The Productive Vocabulary Size of Second Language Learners upon Entry into Higher Education

Eihab Abu-Rabiah

doi:10.31261/TAPSLA.16594

Published: 2025-06-24

Vol. 11 No. 1 (2025)

The Productive Vocabulary Size of Second Language Learners upon Entry into Higher Education

Eihab Abu-Rabiah

Section: Articles

https://doi.org/10.31261/TAPSLA.16594

Abstract

Extensive vocabulary acquisition is a cornerstone of second language (L2) proficiency, directly influencing both receptive and productive language skills. However, research on the productive vocabulary size of L2 learners transitioning to higher education, particularly their mastery of high-frequency words, remains limited. This study investigated the productive Hebrew vocabulary size and frequency distribution of Arabic-speaking learners entering higher education programs where Hebrew is the primary language of instruction. The research employed a corpus-driven approach, analyzing 156 Hebrew-language argumentative essays (18,054 orthographic words) written by native Arabic-speaking students during a college entrance examination. Automated tools were used to add contextual vocalization and disambiguate homographs, followed by manual annotation mapping each word to its corresponding lemma. The identified lemmas were then compared to established written and spoken Hebrew frequency lists. This process aimed to chart the vocabulary profile of the research population. The study determined that learners had a productive vocabulary size of approximately 1,000 lemmas, despite completing over 1,000 hours of formal L2 instruction. A comparison with established written and spoken Hebrew frequency lists indicated that 50% of the identified lemmas fell within the 1,000 most frequent Hebrew lemmas. Additionally, the learners exhibited a typical vocabulary profile, employing more lemmas from the 1k frequency band (the 1,000 most frequent words) than from the 2k frequency band (words ranked 1,001–2,000). Similarly, their use of lemmas from the 2k band exceeded that of the 3k band (words ranked 2,001–3,000), which in turn surpassed their use of lemmas from the 4k band (words ranked 3,001–4,000). These findings highlight the learners’ significant reliance on high-frequency vocabulary in L2 writing, emphasizing the need for targeted academic vocabulary instruction as they transition to higher education.

Keywords:

second language acquisition , writing assessment , vocabulary assessment , frequency distribution , Zipf’s law , Arabic-speaking learners , Hebrew frequency lists

Download files

PDF

Citation rules

Abu-Rabiah, E. (2025). The Productive Vocabulary Size of Second Language Learners upon Entry into Higher Education. Theory and Practice of Second Language Acquisition, 11(1), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.31261/TAPSLA.16594

Cited by / Share

Licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The Copyright Holders of the submitted texts are the Authors. The Reader is granted the rights to use the material available in the TAPSLA websites and pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative Commons 4.0 International License: Attribution - Share Alike (CC BY-SA 4.0). The user is free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

1. License

The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

2. Author’s Warranties

The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.

If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International".

ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).

3. User Rights

Under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.

4. Co-Authorship

If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.

I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.

References

Abdalla, F., Robb, M. P., & Al-Shatti, T. (2010). Stuttering and lexical category in adult Arabic speakers. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 24(1), 70–81.
Google Scholar

Abu-Rabiah, E. (2020). Lexical measures for testing progress in Hebrew as Arab students’ L2. Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 16(3), 1096–1114. https://doi.org/10.17263/jlls.803551
Google Scholar

Abu-Rabiah, E. (2023). Evaluating L2 vocabulary development features using lexical density and lexical diversity measures. LLT Journal: A Journal on Language and Language Teaching, 26(1), 168–182. https://doi.org/10.24071/llt.v26i1.5841
Google Scholar

Abu-Rabiah, E. (2024). Exploring lexical sophistication in second language: An analysis of vocabulary using a word-rating method. Theory and Practice of Second Language Acquisition, 10(2), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.31261/TAPSLA.15623
Google Scholar

Abu-Rabiah, E., Gafter, R., & Henkin, R. (2023). Where syntactic interference persists: The case of Hebrew written by native Arabic speakers. L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 23, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.21248/l1esll.2023.23.1.399
Google Scholar

Ambridge, B., Kidd, E., Rowland, C. F., & Theakston, A. L. (2015). The ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition. Journal of Child Language, 42(2), 239–273.
Google Scholar

Brown, D., Stoeckel, T., McLean, S., & Stewart, J. (2022). The most appropriate lexical unit for L2 vocabulary research and pedagogy: A brief review of the evidence. Applied Linguistics, 43(3), 596–602.‏
Google Scholar

Brysbaert, M., Stevens, M., Mandera, P., & Keuleers, E. (2016). How many words do we know? Practical estimates of vocabulary size dependent on word definition, the degree of language input and the participant’s age. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1116, 1–11.
Google Scholar

Cobb, T., & Horst, M. (2004). Is there room for an AWL in French? In T. Cobb & M. Horst (Eds.), Vocabulary in a second language: Selection, acquisition, and testing (pp. 15–38). John Benjamins B.V.
Google Scholar

Cook, V. (2016). Second language learning and language teaching. Routledge.
Google Scholar

Craig, H. (2011). Shakespeare’s vocabulary: Myth and reality. Shakespeare Quarterly, 62(1), 53–74.
Google Scholar

Crossley, S. A., Skalicky, S., Kyle, K., & Monteiro, K. (2019). Absolute frequency effects in second language lexical acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 41(4), 721–744.
Google Scholar

DICTA. Analytical tools for Hebrew texts: https://morph-analysis.dicta.org.il/
Google Scholar

Fan, M. (2000). How big is the gap and how to narrow it? An investigation into the active and passive vocabulary knowledge of L2 learners. RELC Journal, 31(2), 105–119.
Google Scholar

Gablasova, D., & Brezina, V. (2021). Words that matter in L2 research and pedagogy: A corpus-linguistics perspective. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 43(5), 958–961.
Google Scholar

Ha, L., Sicilia-Garcia, E., Ming, J., Smith, F. (2002). Extension of Zipf’s law to words and phrases. In COLING 2002: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Computational Linguistics.
Google Scholar

Hatzigeorgiu, N., Mikros, G., & Carayannis, G. (2001). Word length, word frequencies and Zipf’s law in the Greek language. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, 8(3), 175–185.
Google Scholar

heTenTen21 corpus: Hebrew Web corpus 2021: https://www.sketchengine.eu/hetenten-hebrew-corpus/
Google Scholar

Ilgen, B., & Karaoglan, B. (2007). Investigation of Zipf’s “law-of-meaning” on Turkish corpora. In 22nd International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences (ISCIS 2007) (pp. 1–6).
Google Scholar

Jayaram, B. D., & Vidya, M. N. (2008). Zipf’s law for Indian languages. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, 15(4), 293–317.
Google Scholar

Jarvis, S., & Hashimoto, B. J. (2021). How operationalizations of word types affect measures of lexical diversity. International Journal of Learner Corpus Research, 7(1), 163–194.
Google Scholar

Kremmel, B. (2016), Word families and frequency bands in vocabulary tests: Challenging conventions. TESOL Quarterly, 50(40), 976–987.
Google Scholar

Kweon, S. O., & Kim, H.R. (2008). Beyond raw frequency: Incidental vocabulary acquisition in extensive reading. Reading in a Foreign Language, 20(2), 191–215.
Google Scholar

Lau, S. H., Huang, Y., Ferreira, V. S., & Vul, E. (2019). Perceptual features predict word frequency asymmetry across modalities. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 81, 1076–1087.
Google Scholar

Laufer, B. (2017). From word parts to full texts: Searching for effective methods of vocabulary learning. Language Teaching Research, 21(1), 5–11.
Google Scholar

Laufer, B., & Yano, Y. (2001). Understanding unfamiliar words in a text: Do L2 learners understand how much they don’t understand? Reading in a Foreign Language, 13(2), 549–566.
Google Scholar

Leijten, M., Van Waes, L., & Ransdell, S. (2010). Correcting text production errors: Isolating the effects of writing mode from error span, input mode, and lexicality. Written Communication, 27(2), 189–227.
Google Scholar

Lenko-Szymanska, A. (2002). How to trace the growth in learners’ active vocabulary? A corpus-based study. In B. Kettermann & M. Georg (Eds.), Teaching and learning by doing corpus analysis (pp. 217–230). Rodopi.
Google Scholar

Llach, M. P. A., & Gallego, M. T. (2009). Examining the relationship between receptive vocabulary size and written skills of primary school learners. Atlantis, 31(1), 129–147.
Google Scholar

Mairano, P., & Santiago, F. (2020). What vocabulary size tells us about pronunciation skills: Issues in assessing L2 learners. Journal of French Language Studies, 30(2), 141–160.
Google Scholar

Manor, R., & Watad, A. (2024). The complexity of teaching Hebrew in Israel’s Arab school system. Language Teaching, 58(1), 14–26.
Google Scholar

Maw, T. M. M., Clenton, J., & Higginbotham, G. (2022). Investigating whether a flemma count is a more distinctive measurement of LD. Assessing Writing, 53, 100640.‏
Google Scholar

Meara, P. M. (1992). EFL vocabulary tests. University College Swansea: Center for Applied Language Studies.
Google Scholar

Miao, J. (2019). A study on English majors’ vocabulary size and its correlation with scores on test for English majors grade-four. In 2nd International Conference on Contemporary Education, Social Sciences and Ecological Studies (pp. 202–208). Atlantis Press.
Google Scholar

Milton, J. (2006). Language lite? Learning French vocabulary in school. Journal of French Language Studies, 16(2), 187–205.
Google Scholar

Milton, J. (2009). Measuring second language vocabulary acquisition. Multilingual Matters.
Google Scholar

Milton, J., & Meara, P. (1998). Are the British really bad at learning foreign languages?. Language Learning Journal, 18(1), 68–76.
Google Scholar

Milton, J., & Treffers-Daller, J. (2013). Vocabulary size revisited: The link between vocabulary size and academic achievement. Applied Linguistics Review, 4(1), 151–172.
Google Scholar

Milton, J., Wade, J. & Hopkins, N. (2010). Aural word recognition and oral competence in English as a Foreign Language. In R. Chacon-Beltrán, C. Abello-Contesse, & M. Torreblanca-López (Eds.), Insights into non-native vocabulary teaching and learning (83–98). Multilingual Matters.
Google Scholar

Montero-SaizAja, A. (2022). The productive vocabulary of multimodal and unimodal English as a Foreign Language learners. Porta Linguarum: Revista Internacional de Didáctica de Las Lenguas Extranjeras. Monográfico, 4, 139–153.
Google Scholar

Nation, I. (2006). How large a vocabulary is needed for reading and listening? Canadian Modern Language Review, 63(1), 59–82.
Google Scholar

Nation, I. S. P., & Coxhead, A. (2021). Measuring native-speaker vocabulary size. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Google Scholar

Nation, I. S. P. (2001). Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge.
Google Scholar

Nation, P. (2021). Thoughts on word families. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 43(5), 969–972.
Google Scholar

Nizonkiza, D. (2016). First-year university students’ receptive and productive use of academic vocabulary. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics, 45, 169–187.
Google Scholar

Pan, B. A., Rowe, M. L., Singer, J. D., & Snow, C. E. (2005). Maternal correlates of growth in toddler vocabulary production in low‐income families. Child Development, 76(4), 763–782.
Google Scholar

Pinto, J. D. (2018). Creating a frequency dictionary of spoken Hebrew: A reproducible use of technology to overcome scarcity of data. Doctoral dissertation, University of Texas at Austin.
Google Scholar

Richards, B. J., & Malvern, D. D. (1997). Quantifying lexical diversity in the study of language development. University of Reading, Faculty of Education and Community Studies.
Google Scholar

Rowe, M. L., Raudenbush, S. W., & Goldin‐Meadow, S. (2012). The pace of vocabulary growth helps predict later vocabulary skill. Child Development, 83(2), 508–525.
Google Scholar

Schmitt, N. (2014). Size and depth of vocabulary knowledge: What the research shows. Language Learning, 64(4), 913–951.
Google Scholar

Schmitt, N., & Schmitt, D. (2020). Vocabulary in language teaching. Cambridge University Press.
Google Scholar

Shimron, J., & Sivan, T. (1994). Reading proficiency and orthography evidence from Hebrew and English. Language Learning, 44(1), 5–27.
Google Scholar

Treffers-Daller, J., Parslow, P., & Williams, S. (2018). Back to basics: How measures of lexical diversity can help discriminate between CEFR levels. Applied Linguistics, 39(3), 302–327.
Google Scholar

Van Zeeland, H., & Schmitt, N. (2013). Lexical coverage in L1 and L2 listening comprehension: The same or different from reading comprehension? Applied Linguistics, 34(4), 457–479.
Google Scholar

Vassiliu, P. (2001). Lexical input and uptake in the low level EFL classroom. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Wales Swansea.
Google Scholar

Vejdemo, S., & Hörberg, T. (2016). Semantic factors predict the rate of lexical replacement of content words. PloS ONE, 11(1), e0147924.
Google Scholar

Webb, S. (2008). Receptive and productive vocabulary sizes of L2 learners. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 30(1), 79–95.
Google Scholar

Webb, S., & Rodgers, M. P. (2009). The lexical coverage of movies. Applied Linguistics, 30(3), 407–427.
Google Scholar

Webb, S., & Rodgers, M. P. (2009). Vocabulary demands of television programs. Language Learning, 59(2), 335–366.
Google Scholar

Wesche, M., & Paribakht, T. S. (1996). Enhancing vocabulary acquisition through reading: A hierarchy of text-related exercise types. The Canadian Modern Language Review, 52, 154–178.
Google Scholar

Wilkins, D. A. (1972). Linguistics in language teaching. Edward Arnold.
Google Scholar

Vol. 11 No. 1 (2025)
Published: 2025-06-26

ISSN: 2450-5455

eISSN: 2451-2125

10.31261/tapsla

Publisher

Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego | University of Silesia Press

Licence CC

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Submit