Open AccessEvaluating the Efficacy of Yes–No Checklist Tests to Assess Knowledge of Multi-Word Lexical Units
Author(s) -
Raymond Stubbe,
Yumiko Cochrane
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
vocabulary learning and instruction
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2187-2759
pISSN - 2187-2767
DOI - 10.7820/vli.v08.1.stubbe.cochrane
Subject(s) - vocabulary , test (biology) , word (group theory) , checklist , phrase , natural language processing , intuition , computer science , artificial intelligence , linguistics , psychology , stop words , cognitive psychology , paleontology , philosophy , biology , cognitive science , preprocessor
One of the many challenges facing Japanese university students studying English is the multi-word phrase. The English language contains a large number of such multiple-word items, which act as single words with a single meaning. This study is concerned with evaluating the efficacy of yes/no checklist tests to assess knowledge of multi-word units. Participants (n = 206) took a yes–no test of 30 real words and 15 pseudowords. The 30 real words were selected from the students’ textbook, based on the teacher’s intuition of the words and multi-words posing the greatest learning burden for the students. Twenty-one of the selected words were single-word items. The remaining nine were multi-words, such as “get up” and “take turns”. Forty-five minutes following completion of the yes–no test, an English to Japanese translation test of the same 30 real words was taken by the same participants to evaluate the efficacy of yes/no test. Results suggest that the yes–no vocabulary test format may be able to measure student knowledge of multi-word lexical units as (or more) effectively than single-word units.