MEASURING ACADEMIC VOCABULARY KNOWLEDGE: TRIANGULATING MEASURES OF RECEPTIVE AND PRODUCTIVE KNOWLEDGE

In all English-medium contexts, students’ proficiency in English is a critical factor for academic success. Underpinning the ability to listen to lectures, take part in seminar discussions, read textbooks, write assessment texts etc. is vocabulary knowledge. A considerable body of research has investigated the development of vocabulary knowledge in L2 users of English. However, this research has tended to focus more on receptive than productive knowledge, and few studies have explored the relationship between the two, especially in academic contexts. This paper will report the results of an investigation into the receptive and productive academic vocabulary knowledge of students in English taught master's programs. Three measures of vocabulary knowledge were used: (i) a test of receptive academic vocabulary knowledge using the format of the Vocabulary Levels Test; (ii) a test of academic words using the format of the Productive Vocabulary Levels Test; and (iii) a profile of students’ use of academic vocabulary in a corpus of assessment writing tasks. The results from these three approaches permitted triangulation, thus informing the relationship between receptive and productive knowledge. The results reveal distinct patterns of receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge. Implications for learning, and teaching, in contexts of EMI will be discussed.