Measuring the productive vocabulary of secondary school CLIL students: Is Lex30 a valid test for low-level school learners?

Abstract

Since it was issued (Meara and Fitzpatrick, 2000), Lex30 has been validated as an adequate instrument to measure L2 learners'productive vocabulary, mostly, in studies with university students (Fitzpatrick and Clenton 2010) but it has been also used with young learners in foreign language contexts (Jiménez Catalán and Moreno Espinosa, 2005; Moreno Espinosa, 2009; 2010). The study reported in this paper focuses on assessing the validity and reliability of Lex30 to measure the productive vocabulary of two groups of secondary school students (N=48) following a CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) programme by analysing: 1) its reliability, 2) whether it correlates with general language pro ciency, 3) if it measures vocabulary growth over long periods of time and 4) if it is sensitive to the possible effect of the context of learning on the productive vocabulary of the learner. The results suggest that Lex30 could be an appropriate test to be used with secondary school learners but they also seem to indicate that, especially in speci c educational contexts such as CLIL, Lex30 scores should be interpreted with caution