Theoretical and Practical Aspects of Different Testing and Vocabulary Types

Abstract

Vocabulary knowledge is an essential skill for language users to understand and use a language correctly. For teachers, it is useful to be able to test this knowledge from various aspects: meaning, word forms, collocations and the ability of students to surmise the meanings of unknown words from the context. The type of test is provided depends on the purpose of testing. Perhaps the most important reason of testing is to find out how well students have mastered the language skills which they were taught and help them solve occurring problems. The article aims to analyze different methods of vocabulary testing as well as two vocabulary types, academic and technical. In addition, the study tries to determine how these testing and vocabulary types are related to the number of mistakes students make in a test and to find out students’ opinion about difficulties they experience in relation to different testing types and factors influencing tests results. The theoretical background of the article is largely based on theoretical material on vocabulary testing, its methods, vocabulary types, passive and active vocabulary knowledge while the practical part includes the questionnaire data. The analysis of the data has revealed that academic vocabulary and its usage cause more problems to learners than the technical one, and that the most difficult task types are word building, definition making and collocation tasks.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.24.6892