Study of lexical knowledge of secondary Spanish FFL students

Abstract

Given the importance of vocabulary in the language learning and the scarcity of studies carried out in the field of French as a foreign language, our purpose in this article is, on the one hand, to analyze the vocabulary size of a sample of Spanish Secondary students and, on the other hand, to study their progress during such an educational stage, using for that an adaptation to French of the test X_Lex (Meara and Milton, 2003). The results show that although, in a general way, the vocabulary increases from one course to the other, there are only statistically significant differences in the students’ vocabulary from First course of Bachillerato with respect to the previous courses, revealing a developmental pattern similar to that brought to light in other studies (David, 2008; Milton, 2006). Likewise, we verify the influence of the frequency on the vocabulary learned by the participants in the study.