A Study of the extent to which receptive types of vocabulary knowledge indicates subjects depth of vocabulary knowledge (A case study in a secondary school medium)

Vocabulary has been the main concern of many studies in foreign language teaching field. Therefore, the present study was carried out in the belief that further research dealing with the assessment of lexical knowledge may bring valuable contributions to second language teachingMearning process. This descriptive study was carried out in secondary school medium. There were a total of fifty- seven preparatory students. The subjects were between 14-15 years old. The two receptive tests which were chosen for the purposes of this study were the multiple-choice and matching tasks. The purpose in establishing a variety and balance in choice of vocabulary items was to eliminate unwanted contamination in our research results due to any uncontrolled conditions. As a matter of fact, the effects of the four parts of speech on subjects' performance in the given tests were individually tested before moving onto determine whether receptive tests were reliable indicatorsIll of our subjects' depth of knowledge regarding the same lexical items. Two tests were constructed (Test- A, Test-B), each of which contained twenty-four items which were comprised of six abstract nouns and six state verbs in the matching format; six action verbs and six concrete nouns in the multiple- choice format (Test- A). The words which were tested through matching format in Test-A were tested through multiple- choice format in Test-B and vice versa. In other words, half the class took the test of the same items in multiple- choice format while the other half did so in the matching format. The purpose of doing this was to observe the differences in subjects' performance in relation to different parts of speech. After the data were collected, the results were analyzed by means of SPSS. Therefore, regression analysis and independent samples t- test were conducted. One of the main findings was that subjects' success in recognition types of vocabulary tests such as multiple-choice and matching tests will not be a significant predictor of subjects' success in productive types of vocabulary tests such as the Vocabulary Knowledge Scale. Another main finding was that if a measurement technique consists of verbs only (i.e. state or action verbs) or words of abstraction (i.e. state verbs or abstract nouns), test type plays a significant role in subjects' performance in these tests. On the other hand, test type is not a significant factor for vocabulary tests containing nouns only (i.e. abstract or concrete nouns) or words of concreteness ( action verbs and concrete nouns).