| dc.description.abstract | The present thesis is a study of the English vocabulary size of 70 Norwegian 10th grade pupils. The aim was to find the receptive and productive vocabulary size of English learners at lower secondary school. Additional aims were to investigate how exposure to extramural English influences the receptive vocabulary size, as well as analyzing written learner texts to find what characterizes the productive vocabulary size in terms of lexical richness. Moreover, the present thesis also aimed to map learner beliefs concerning vocabulary learning.
For data collection, a mixed methods approach was used, including an online vocabulary size test to find the receptive vocabulary size, the online lexical analysis program VocabProfiler to estimate the productive vocabulary size, and a questionnaire to discover the pupils’ exposure to extramural English and their beliefs about vocabulary learning.
The findings show that the average receptive vocabulary size was 7,795 word families, and the average productive vocabulary size was estimated to be 3,386 word families. Furthermore, the findings indicated that exposure to extramural English influences the receptive vocabulary size of L2 learners in a positive manner. In terms of lexical richness, the results showed that pupils who scored a higher vocabulary size showed more lexical variation and made fewer lexical errors. The findings of the questionnaire showed that most of the pupils believe that vocabulary knowledge is important to learn English, and that they believe they learn most of their English vocabulary through extramural English activities. | |
