Vocabulary use in the FCE Listening test - Cambridge English Exams

2 | CAMBRIDGE ESOL : RESEARCH NOTES : ISSUE 32 / MAY 2008When submitting material for Main Suite Listeningpapers, item writers are asked to base each text on anauthentic context which may be written or spoken, forexample, a newspaper article or a radio discussionprogramme. Item writers are directed to make sure that,wherever the original text comes from, the tape script iswritten using oral rather than written language.Testing ListeningReal-world speech contains many ambiguities, pauses andfalse starts. If any of these affect comprehension the listenercan clarify by asking questions. In an exam situation this isnot possible and so texts and answer keys for listening testsneed to be unambiguous. Added to this there areconstraints of time and length and the need to mediateculturally specific references. For all these reasons realworldtexts will need a degree of adaptation to make themsuitable for use in a Listening test. The effects of thisadaptation on the listener have been little studied andresearch in the area of listening comprehension has beenlimited, as Joan Rubin (1994) notes. One study she quotes(Voss 1994) appeared to show that pause phenomenadistracted from students’ comprehension of a text.However, Chaudron (quoted in Rubin 1994) and Chiangand Dunkel (quoted in Rubin 1994) have both shown thatredundancy helps comprehension in high-intermediatestudents 1 .These findings are, however, inconclusive, as most of thestudies quoted were done using invented, isolated text(Rubin 1994).Key differences between written andspoken languageSpoken and written language have evolved differentgrammars and vocabularies. Summarising these, Chafe(1982) noted that spoken language is characterised byfragmentation and written language, by integration. Chafefound that this integration was achieved by the use ofmethods such as nominalisation and the use of participlesand attributive adjectives. In other words, it tends to begrammatical words that are lost in this process ofintegration, to be replaced by a greater use of informationgivingwords.Chafe (1982) also realised that the way speakers interactwith their audiences leads to spoken language beingcharacterised by involvement, whereas written language ischaracterised by detachment. He notes the ways in whichspeakers create involvement: by the use of the first person,the vocalisation of mental processes, monitoring ofinformation using discourse markers and the use of ‘fuzzy’language – or language that is purposefully vague. Vaguelanguage tends to use high frequency lexis and grammaticalwords, such as: things like that, or anything, and so on,loads of.It is important to note, however, that the differencesnoted above are not dichotomous. Tannen (1982) talksabout the notion of an oral/literate continuum, with somewritten texts, such as personal letters relatively closer to theoral end and some spoken texts, such as lectures, closer tothe literate end.This article will now consider two aspects of lexis thatresearchers have used to define genres and to place texts atsome point along this continuum: lexical density and wordfrequency.Lexical DensityHalliday (1989) noted that ‘written language displays amuch higher ratio of lexical items to total running words’than spoken language, and went as far as to say that thedefining characteristic of written language is lexical density.In its simplest form, lexical density is the percentageof lexical items (L) to total number of items (N) in a text:100 × L/N 2 .Stubbs (1996) who considers lexical density to be ‘arobust method of distinguishing genres’, carried out astudy in which he found lexical densities for spoken texts of34% to 58%. For written texts the figures were 40% to 65%.He concluded that the ‘clearest difference is not betweenwritten and spoken language but between spoken genres’.He also noted that genres where no feedback was possible(that is, monologues such as radio commentary) had higherlevels of lexical density – from 46% to 64% – and thosewhere feedback was possible (that is dialogues such asradio discussions) had lower levels – from 34% to 44%.It is hypothesised that the genre of radio programmescomes more towards the literate end of the oral/literatecontinuum than some other modes of speech such aslanguage in action conversations. This is because radiointerviews are often partially planned. Whilst the interviewsmay not be scripted, the interviewee may have been briefedabout the topics likely to be covered. This means that theywill be less likely to need thinking time as they are talkingand will be less likely to make errors or need to restate apoint than in, say, a conversation with friends. Theparticipants will also be aware that they are broadcasting topeople who have varying degrees of background knowledgeabout the topic. This means that the participants are likelyto clarify and explain more than if they knew they weretalking to, for example, a colleague in the same field.It is probable, therefore, that on the oral/literatecontinuum this genre will be somewhat closer to theliterate end than other oral genres.Word frequency and corporaIn order to compare individual texts to the language as awhole, a large amount of data from corpora is needed.This study uses data from the British National Corpus(BNC) which is a corpus of British English set up by acollaboration of Oxford University Press, LancasterUniversity and other organisations. 3 There are 100 million1. Although it hinders comprehension in low intermediate students.2. There are many suggested ways to calculate lexical density (see, for example,O’Loughlin 1995, Stubbs 1986, Ure 1971).3. See www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk©UCLES 2008 – The contents of this publication may not be reproduced without the written permission of the copyright holder.