To What Extent Does Long-Term Foreign Language Education Help Improve Spoken Second Language Lexical Proficiency?

Abstract

The current study examined lexical aspects of second language (L2) speech attainment in the foreign language (FL) classroom setting (i.e., several hours of target language input per week). A total of 72 second-year university students with 7 years of FL study and no experience abroad participated in the study. Their spontaneous speech was analyzed via a set of lexical measures and then compared to that of experienced, naturalistic Japanese L2 learners of English. According to the results, their lexical proficiency was factored into three dimensions—appropriateness (global, semantic, morphosyntactic accuracy), specificity (frequency, range), and abstractness (concreteness, meaningfulness, imageability, hypernymy). Overall, extensive FL education led many participants’ specificity performance to reach proficiency levels comparable to the baseline group. Approximately half of participants achieved such satisfactory proficiency in abstractness. The participants’ lexical appropriateness demonstrated a great deal of individual variability and was linked to the extent to which they had recently practiced the target language.