Over the last 20 years vocabulary research has grown from a Cinderella subject to a position of some importance. Vocabulary is now considered integral to just about every aspect of language knowledge and is a lively and vital area of research and innovation. With this development have come standard and widely-used tests, such as vocabulary size and lexical richness measures, and commonly accepted metaphors, such as the mental lexicon as a web of words. Less widely known outside academic circles, however, is the extensive work on learners' lexis and the utility, reliability and validity of the tests we use to measure and investigate it. This volume brings together contributions from internationally-renowned researchers in this field to explain much of the background to study in this area. It introduces to a wider audience the concerns, the newest approaches and developments in the field of vocabulary research and testing.

Table of Contents

1. Fundamental issues in modelling and assessing vocabulary knowledge 2. Lexical profiles, learner aptitude and the construct validity of lexical size tests 3. Learners' response behaviour in yes/no vocabulary tests 4. Validity and threats to validity of vocabulary measures 5. Comparing measures of vocabulary richness 6. Productive vocabulary tests and the search for concurrent validity 7. Exploring measures of vocabulary richness in the semi-spontaneous speech of native and non-native speakers of French 8. Lexical richness and the oral proficiency of Chinese EFL students 9. Implementing Graph Theory approaches to the exploration of density and structure in L1 and L2 word association networks 10. Insights into the structure of L1 and L2 vocabulary networks 11. Assessing vocabulary for the purpose of reading diagnosis 12. Combined methodological approaches to the assessment of vocabulary in oral proficiency interviews 13. Teacher ratings of EFL essays and different aspects of lexical richness