@article{oai:meilib.repo.nii.ac.jp:00000495,
 author = {Bennett, Phillip and Stoeckel, Tim},
 journal = {比較文化, Comparative culture, the journal of Miyazaki International College},
 month = {},
 note = {This paper describes a project aimed at assessing English as a foreign language lexical 
knowledge of students in their first three semesters of study at college. Four 
equivalent forms of an instrument to test written receptive knowledge of the words in 
the General Service List (GSL) and the Academic List (AWL) were developed for 
this purpose. A validation study with 334 participants found that the instrument had 
satisfactory dimensionality, the vast majority of its items displayed good technical 
quality, and Rasch person reliability estimates ranged from .87 to .93 for the four 
forms. The main study used this instrument to track the vocabulary growth of 144 
students from two cohorts over each of their first three semesters of college. On 
average, these students entered college with knowledge of approximately 1,440 
(56.0%) of the words tested, a figure which increased to 1,790 (69.6%) after three 
semesters. With a minimum criterion set at 80% for demonstrating satisfactory 
knowledge of a word list, only a minority of students entered college with satisfactory 
knowledge of either the first or second half of the GSL or the AWL. After three 
semesters, the majority of students reached this threshold for the first half of the GSL 
but not for the other two word bands.},
 pages = {1--36},
 title = {Second-Language Vocabulary Growth in the First Three Semesters of College},
 volume = {17},
 year = {2012}
}