A Japanese-English Bilingual Version of the New General Service List Test

Abstract

This paper describes the development and initial validation of a Japanese-English bilingual version of the New General Service List Test (NGSLT; Stoeckel & Bennett, 2015). The New General Service List (NGSL; Browne, 2013) consists of 2,800 high frequency words and is intended to provide maximal coverage of texts for learners of English. The NGSLT is a diagnostic instrument designed to identify gaps in knowledge of words on the NGSL. The NGSLT is a multiple-choice test that consists of 5 levels, each assessing knowledge of 20 randomly sampled words from a 560-word frequency-based level of the NGSL. A bilingual version of the NGSLT was developed to minimize the risk of conflating vocabulary knowledge with understanding of the answer choices. A validation study with 382 Japanese high school and university learners found the instrument to be reliable (α =.97) and unidimensional and to demonstrate good fit to the Rasch model.