Learning vocabulary in another language

A test of teachers' knowledge

1 - How many word families does an average adult native speaker of English know?

A - 150,000
B - 100,000
C - 50,000
D - 20,000
E - don't know

2 - If learners know the most frequent 2000 words of English, what percentage of running words in an academic text will be known to them?

A - 60%
B - 80%
C - 90%
D - 98%
E - don't know

3 - What is the most important factor in formal measures of readability?

A - background knowledge
B - vocabulary knowledge
C - reading skill in L1
D - grammatical knowledge
E - don't know

4 - The most effective way of beginning to learn the meaning of a word is by

A - the use of a picture
B - translation into the first language
C - a dictionary definition
D - seeing a word in context
E - don't know

5 - How many words does an average learner of English as a foreign language know after five or six years of four 50 minute English classes per week?

A - 1,000
B - 3,000
C - 5,000
D - 10,000
E - don't know

6 - Initially opposites like hot and cold should be learned

A - at the same time
B - in quick succession
C - as part of a bigger lexical set
D - at widely separated times
E - don't know

7 - Complex words like inventiveness and uncontrollably are usually stored in the brain as

A - stems and affixes that are combined when needed
B - both as whole units and word parts
C - complete analyzed words
D - complete unanalyzed words
E - don't know

8 - Learners most often have problems in guessing the meaning of a word in helpful contexts because they

A - give too much attention to the form of the word
B - do not use their background knowledge of the topic
C - do not draw on clues from neighboring sentences or paragraphs
D - do not give attention to the immediate context of the word
E - don't know

9 - In order to have a good chance of guessing the meaning of an unknown word from context clues, what percentage of the running words in the text does the learner need to know?

A - 78%
B - 80%
C - 90%
D - 98%
E - don't know

10 - When learners know the most common 2000 words of English, the words that they have most difficulty with in academic texts in their specialist area are

A - general purpose academic words like assume , concept , diverse
B - function words like because , although , hence
C - proper nouns like D - arwin , Menlo Park , E - dgebaston
D - technical words like anode , impedance , galvonometer
E - don't know

11 - The "lexical bar" is

A - the Graeco-Latin words of English
B - the high frequency words of English
C - the function words of English
D - the discourse markers of English
E - don't know

12 - Teachers should deal with low frequency words by

A - breaking them into prefixes, stems and suffixes
B - letting learners guess them from context
C - teaching the learners strategies to deal with them
D - providing varied and repeated opportunities to give attention to those words
E - don't know

13 - Which of these most helps vocabulary learning?

A - meeting or using the word in a new way
B - having its meaning explained
C - meeting the word in context
D - searching for the word in a dictionary
E - don't know

14 - Definitions of unknown words are most effective if

A - they are short
B - they contain plenty of useful detail
C - they are written as complete sentences
D - they are accompanied by grammatical information
E - don't know

15 Most learning of vocabulary used in oral communication tasks involves words

A - whose meanings are negotiated in the task
B - whose meanings are not negotiated in the task
C - which are in the written input to the task
D - which are not in the written input to the task
E - don't know

16 - A - "book flood" involves

A - doing a lot of intensive reading in class
B - setting a lot of intensive reading outside class
C - replacing a large part of the class work with extensive reading
D - encouraging extensive reading outside class time
E - don't know

17 - The "Lexical Frequency Profile" is a way of

A - measuring productive vocabulary use
B - deciding what will be classified as high frequency words
C - comparing the frequency of selected words
D - diagrammatically representing vocabulary growth
E - don't know

18 - Quickly providing meanings for unknown words while listening or reading

A - has little effect on comprehension of the text
B - upsets comprehension of the text
C - greatly increases the amount of vocabulary learned
D - results in little vocabulary learning
E - don't know

19 - A - bout what percentage of the low frequency words of English comes from French, Latin or Greek?

A - 20%
B - 40%
C - 60%
D - 80%
E - don't know

20 - How many closely related members does a typical English word family have?

A - 3
B - 5
C - 7
D - 9
E - don't know

21 - D - uring writing activities, learners use dictionaries most often to

A - check spelling
B - look up the meaning of a word
C - see if a word exists
D - find out about the grammar of the word
E - don't know

22 - "Retrieval" involves

A - receptive learning
B - productive learning
C - recalling an item
D - recognizing that two given items go together
E - don't know

23 - The sentence "To be or not to be, that is the question" consists of ten

A - tokens
B - types
C - lemmas
D - word families
E - don't know

24 - A - "lemma" is a base word and

A - all its derived forms
B - all its inflected forms
C - all its related forms
D - all its inflected forms which are the same part of speech
E - don't know

25 - An "Academic vocabulary" is made up of words that

A - are only used in academic texts
B - are only used in a specialised field
C - are found in a wide range of academic texts
D - are found in a wide range of academic and non-academic texts
E - don't know

26 - How many chunks of information can be held in short-term memory at any one time?

A - one
B - about three
C - about seven
D - about ten
E - don't know

27 - The General Service List of English Words is a list of

A - 30,000 words and their frequencies
B - the commonest collocations
C - 2,000 high frequency words
D - words that can be used to define other words
E - don't know

28 - To test learners' productive knowledge of vocabulary we must get learners to

A - produce words in spoken or written sentences
B - produce spoken or written forms from a meaning cue
C - produce or recognize spoken or written word forms from a meaning cue
D - produce a first language translation of words
E - don't know

29 - Vocabulary tests using different test formats tend to correlate with each other with a correlation around

A - 0.3
B - 0.5
C - 0.7
D - 0.9
E - don't know

30 - Coxhead's Academic Word List contains

A - 492 word families
B - 570 word families
C - 836 word families
D - 1,000 word families
E - don't know

A - nswers

1 - D -
2 - B -
3 - B -
4 - B -
5 - B -
6 - D -
7 - A -
8 - A -
9 - D -
10 - A -
11 - A -
12 - C -
13 - A -
14 - A -
15 - B -
16 - C -
17 - A -
18 - C -
19 - C -
20 - C -
21 - A -
22 - C -
23 - A -
24 - D -
25 - C -
26 - C -
27 - C -
28 - B -
29 - C -
30 - B -