A Corpus-Based Evaluation of the Common European Framework Vocabulary for French Teaching and Learning

• Main Author: Kusseling, Francoise S.
• Format: Others
• Published: BYU ScholarsArchive 2012
• Subjects: French; CEFR profiles; corpora; vocabulary; evaluation; Educational Psychology
• Online Access: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/3506; https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4505&context=etd

The CEFR French profiles have been widely used to teach and evaluate language instruction over the past decade. The profiles were specifications of vocabulary that have been largely untested from a corpus-based, empirical perspective. The purpose of this dissertation was to evaluate the CEFR profiles by comparing their content with two sizable contemporary corpora. This study quantified and described the vocabulary overlap and uniqueness across all three of these resources. Four areas of overlap and three areas of uniqueness were analyzed and identified. Slightly over 40% of the lexical content was common to the three resources studied. Additionally, 16.3% was unique to the CEFR. The remaining CEFR content overlapped with one or the other of the two corpora used for the evaluation. The findings led to the general recommendation of keeping about 60% of the current CEFR content and adding a little over 19,000 vocabulary items to the overhauled CEFR profiles.