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Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition A Rationale for Pedagogy Edited by James Coady, Thomas Huckin Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139524643 Online ISBN: 9781139524643 Hardback ISBN: 9780521561327 Paperback ISBN: 9780521567640
Chapter Chapter 8 - Rare words, complex lexical units and the advanced learner pp. 157-173 Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139524643.012 Cambridge University Press
Q Rare words, complex lexical units and the advanced learner

Pierre J. L. Arnaud and Sandra J. Savignon
Introduction
It is often acknowledged in the language teaching community that native speaker-like competence is neither a very realistic nor necessarily a desirable goal for the average adolescent or adult foreign language learner. Some learners, however, do manage to attain a proficiency level at which it is difficult to distinguish their performance subjectively from that of native speakers. If this is rare in the case of pronunciation, receptive lexical performance more frequently displays apparent native characteristics. The research presented here was aimed at determining how "passive" knowledge of rare words and complex lexical units by advanced learners increases with level of study and eventually compares with that of native speakers.
Passive vocabulary
It should be made clear at the outset what is understood here by "passive" knowledge. Many a paragraph in the literature is devoted to "what it means to know a word," but passive knowledge can best be described by considering what happens when an utterance is comprehended: Using phonetic clues present in the speech continuum, the phonological representation [significant) of a lexeme is accessed, which in turn permits access to the representation of its meaning (signifie). Whether this semantic representation leads to another, extralinguistic and more abstract "higher" representation or concept is relatively unclear at present in the
For help and advice, the authors are grateful to Daniel Serant (Universite Claude Bernard-Lyon 1) and Jacques Aupetit (Universite Lumiere-Lyon 2); of course, any errors remain their own responsibility. They are deeply indebted to Tony Silva (Purdue University), who provided access to the native-speaker group. They also thank the anonymous teacher trainers at the Institut Universitaire de Formation des Maitres de PAcademie de Lyon (IUFM) who volunteered to take part in the experiment. During the preparation of this article the first author was also part-time director of studies with the IUFM de PAcademie de Lyon.
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semantic or psycholinguistic literatures (see, for instance, Cruse, 1988, and Segui and Beauvillain, 1988, respectively), but the ultimate aim of comprehension is that the hearer should form a representation of the speaker's communicative intent, not just of a juxtaposition of lexical and grammatical signifies. This calculus of meaning is interactive (top-down and bottom-up) and it takes place automatically and unconsciously. A lexeme present in a subject's passive vocabulary is therefore one whose signifie can be accessed effortlessly and combined with the other signifies encountered to form overall representations.1 This notion of passive vocabulary is therefore close to those of sight vocabulary or automated vocabulary used by other authors (see, for example, Huckin, Haynes and Coady, 1993, pp. 219, 291).
Rare words
Recent research by Goulden, Nation, and Read (1990) with improved methodology has led to an estimate of 17,000 word families for the vocabulary of an average native-English-speaking university student (a word family groups together a base-form and its derived forms). The L2 vocabularies acquired by secondary school learners are far inferior: For instance, Takala (1984) has found that the average "comprehensiveschool" graduate in the Finnish school system has acquired a passive English vocabulary of approximately 1,500 words over seven years of study. A passive vocabulary comprising the 2,000 most frequent words will cover 87% of the tokens in an average text (Nation, 1990, p. 16), and the consensus, well represented by Nation, is that these 2,000 words should be taught intensively, whereas infrequent words are not worth teaching as class time is limited. Instead, learners should be equipped with strategies for dealing with such words when encountered in a text. A number of objections can be raised, however. Engels (1968) stressed the fact that even though learning 3,000 words provides comprehension of 95% of occurrences, the remaining hundred thousand words - 113,000 headwords in Nation's (1990, p. 16) count - still pose a formidable problem. In addition to this argument, also presented by Honeyfield (1977), one can note that it is precisely those few tokens of rare types that carry the highest information load in any text, and therefore cause the most hindrance in the reading process when unknown. The situation is somewhat
1 A "passive" lexeme may or may not be available for production as well, or rather, it may be available for production in all, certain or no circumstances. It is a general observation that the active vocabulary is a subset of the passive whether in LI or L2, but the relationship between the two is not well understood and merits more research (see, however, Meara, 1990; Melka Teichroew, 1989).
Rare words, complex lexical units and the advanced learner
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more favorable in speech comprehension where lexical variety is considerably reduced (Tripp, 1990) and some interaction may be possible, but lack of lexical knowledge still constitutes a major obstacle to comprehension. Among the strategies generally recommended, guessing in context, on which there exists an extensive literature (see, for instance, Huckin, Haynes and Coady, 1993; Nation, 1990, pp. 160ff.), figures prominently. Guessing in context is not without its problems, however. First of all, it is, strictly speaking, a reading strategy, not primarily a vocabulary acquisition strategy, although its use involves semantic treatment of the input and therefore may facilitate incidental learning (Hulstijn, 1992). Experimental results, however, do not unanimously show such an effect of guessing on vocabulary retention (Mondria & Wit-de Boer, 1991). A second problem is that guessing may result in erroneous guesses (Haynes, 1984; Kelly, 1990; Laufer & Sim, 1985), making some later unlearning necessary. Kelly also remarks that "one stands the greater chance of succeeding the greater one's vocabulary!" In addition, when a rich context facilitates guessing, effortless access to the overall meaning of the passage may just prevent the acquisition of the lexeme (Nation &c Coady, 1988). Kelly (1990) is in favor of the systematic learning of words beyond the most frequent ones and advocates the use of mnemonics, in particular the hookword method, and presents his experience of learning Polish words with it (Kelly, 1989). Generally speaking, the literature is comparatively poor on the subject of learning strategies for words beyond the first two or three thousand, outside the subject of mnemonics. Knowledge of rare words is a valuable goal as it enables an L2 reader to access the meanings of utterances effortlessly and immediately, without having to devote too much energy to lexical guessing. There is a wellestablished link between the vocabulary difficulty and readability of texts (Nation & Coady, 1988), and, considering the learners' individual characteristics in L2 reading, there is a link between lexical proficiency and reading performance: Laufer (1992), correlating Israeli students' English vocabulary size estimates yielded by the Vocabulary Levels Test (Nation, 1990, pp. 26Iff.) and the Eurocentres Vocabulary Tests (Meara &C Jones, 1989) on one hand, and scores on two standardized reading tests on the other hand, has found that 3,000 word families (corresponding to approximately 4,800 words) corresponds to a threshold in reading ability. This in itself constitutes a serious argument in favor of the acquisition of massive doses of vocabulary by learners beyond the most frequent 2,000 or 3,000 words. 2 (See Laufer, Chapter 2, this volume.)
2 Rare words probably pose less of a problem in production, as the learner can usually resort to negotiation strategies in face-to-face interaction and to lexicographical aids
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Complex lexical units

Quantitative data on the learning or use of complex (or multiword) lexical units are less advanced than the data on simple units. One reason for this is that complex units are more difficult to trace in corpora as they take more different shapes in discourse the more complex they are (Arnaud &C Moon, 1993; Moon 1992). The following data on units included in this study, kindly researched in the Oxford, Hector Pilot Corpus of British English (18 million words) by Rosamund Moon, may provide an idea of the discourse frequencies of complex lexical units (all variants are included): tongue-in-cheek to take something in (one's) stride a flash in the pan to beat around the bush it's all in the day's work 31 occurrences 26 13 5 1
Work on machine translation has shed some light on the number of complex units in a language: Research on French at the Laboratoire d'Automatique Documentaire et Linguistique has shown that there are more complex units than simple ones. For instance, there are 6,000 adverbial expressions compared with 2,000 adverbs, 300,000-400,000 compound nouns versus 80,000 simple nouns (reported in Chanier, Colmerauer, Fouquere, Abeille, Picard & Zock, 1993). The figure provided by Goulden et al. (1990) (see above) involved only simple units, and little is known on the number of complex units in native speakers' individual vocabularies. Arnaud (1992) has found, however, that the average French university student is able to recognize some 284 proverbs, and proverbs are but a drop in the phraseological ocean. Complex lexical units are notoriously difficult to classify (Alexander, 1978; Glaser, 1988; Glaser, 1988; Kuusi, 1974) since several parameters, such as degree of fixedness, syntactic nature, idiomaticity and pragmatic function, are involved. These parameters are difficult to combine, and the emphasis may be laid on different ones depending on the purposes of the taxonomy. Thus, work on machine translation may favor syntactic and formal categorization (Danlos, 1988), while pedagogical considerations may lead to different communicative and/or pragmatic approaches (Sornig, 1988). Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992) have combined formal and
in written production - actual knowledge of words being naturally far preferable. Besides, it would appear from an LI experiment that readers are not spontaneously very sensitive to the lexical richness of texts (Thoiron & Arnaud, 1992) and native speakers would certainly detect a nonnative through other clues before they became aware of the paucity of rare words in his or her productions.
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functional considerations in their study of preconstructed units in discourse. Idiomaticity is usually defined as the fact that the meaning of the complex unit does not result from the simple combination of those of its constituents. It is not, however, a simple parameter as many nonlexicalized co-occurrences (spontaneous syntagms) also have an overall meaning that is more than the sum of its parts (David, 1988), and there are various degrees of idiomaticity (Glaser, 1988), which are linked to the opacity or extinct nature of the metaphor that may be involved, or depend on how many of the components take part in the metaphor: to jump the gun is very idiomatic, to jump the queue less so. Most complex lexical units are idiomatic to some degree (Glaser, 1988). Given their numbers, complex lexical units are omnipresent in discourse and the learner must not only acquire their canonical forms as in the case of simple units, but also the ability to recognize their exploited forms, such as "Hook, Lyne and Stinker," the title of a film review {Newsweek, 5/3/93, p. 54), or "Nothing fails like failure" (CBS Evening News, 12/7/93) (see Arnaud and Moon, 1993). Besides their numbers, another source of difficulty is that complex lexical units tend to have much longer signifiants than simple units, which might involve a greater memory load, although experimental results are not univocal on this point (Laufer, 1990). Finally, weakly idiomatic complex units such as to have the last word and complex units that have a close equivalent in the LI, such as to grease someone's palm/graisser la patte a quelqu'un, do not pose a decoding problem and therefore tend to pass unnoticed, which probably hinders their acquisition, as Marton (1977) remarked of collocations. For these reasons, the acquisition of a large stock of complex lexical units is necessary for the advanced learner's receptive competence but involves considerable difficulty (Alexander, 1985; Irujo, 1986). Although all advanced learners cannot be expected to reach a nativelike vocabulary, the case of language teachers is different: One of their professional justifications is the proximity of their competence to that of native speakers.
The study
Two questions are addressed in the present research: (1) How does the lexical knowledge of nonnative professional learners of English, that is, specialist students and teachers, improve with level of study? (2) Can they attain a nativelike level in their passive knowledge of rare words and complex lexical units?
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The tests Rare words

The rareness of lexemes is determined by means of frequency lists. In order to eliminate any bias toward British or American English, it was decided to use two equivalent frequency lists together: Kucera and Francis (1967), which rests on a corpus of 1 million tokens of American text published in 1961, and its British counterpart, Hofland and Johansson (1982), which was purposely collected on similar principles. Modern lexicography uses much larger machine corpora, but these are not readily accessible and the two lists mentioned are sufficient for the purpose of the study. Since there is no standard definition of rare, it was decided that a lexeme would be considered rare if the corresponding family did not include more than six occurrences in the two lists taken together (i.e., three tokens per million), a family gathering together derivatives and the inflected forms that figure separately in these nonlemmatized frequency lists. A list was then assembled of "rare" items that were not transparent French cognates or whose meaning was not otherwise guessable from their form, given the passive nature of the vocabulary knowledge under investigation. Of course, at this frequency level, the proportion of latinate vocabulary (most of which is shared with French), internationalisms or scientific terms is considerable. Given the available testing time and the testing format, sixty items were drawn at random from the resulting list and submitted to three native speakers of British English and three of American English, all teaching assistants in Lyons, who were required to cross out any item they might not know. This led to the elimination of a few words that were apparently more British or American, such as bollard or furlough, and their replacement with other words drawn at random from the original list. This, in addition to the fact that the list (see Appendix A) was specifically designed for the testing of French learners, makes it impossible to consider it an absolutely random sample of a specific frequency range, and no conclusion as to the vocabulary sizes of the subjects will be drawn. There are two principal ways to test passive vocabulary, the checklist method and more traditional multiple-choice tests. The checklist method, or yes/no method (Meara & Buxton, 1987; Read & Nation, 1986), requires that the testees indicate whether or not they know the items on a list. Corrections for optimistic answers are possible if pseudowords are included in the list. This method has the advantage of allowing larger samples to be used than in the case of multiple-choice items, which are
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more time-consuming, but the latter method permits some verification of knowledge of meaning. It was retained for that reason. A key and three distractors were written for each word, using mainly vocabulary contained in the Longman Defining Vocabulary (Longman, 1987), but also obvious cognates. The use of French keys and distractors was precluded by the fact that native speakers were to take part in the study. The task was facilitated by the fact that lexemes in this frequency range tend to be monosemic. Two sample items are reproduced in Appendix B.
Complex lexical units

No frequency list for complex lexical units is readily available and therefore rareness could not be taken into account. A list was compiled from the authors' personal files and collections like Cowie, Mackin and McCaig (1983) and Heaton and Noble (1987). Since here too passive knowledge was to be tested, only idiomatic items were retained. In this category, many units are more or less equivalent in French and English: Chanier et al. (1993) list cases of correspondence, and quote a study by Freckleton (1985), who has found that some 80% of expressions around to take have an idiomatic equivalent in French, and of these 20% are word-for-word equivalents. In addition, many units include metaphors transparent for French speakers although they have no LI equivalent, such as to rub salt into the wound. Only opaque idioms were included. A syntactic-equivalence classification was retained: Each complex unit was classified under the type of syntagm it could substitute for: noun phrase {a damp squib), verb equivalent [to make no bones about X), adjectival, adverbial or prepositional phrase (at a pinch, tongue in cheek), predicates (to bite the bullet), and sentences (sayings: the penny drops). This classification does not exhaust all possible cases, such as some of Nattinger and DeCarrico's (1992) sentence organisers, but most of the ground is covered. From the original list of 166 complex units, 60 were drawn randomly, making sure that the initial proportions of categories were respected: the final list includes 14 noun-phrase equivalents, 7 verb phrases, 10 adjectival, adverbial or prepositional phrases, 25 predicates and 3 sayings (Appendix C). 3 After verification with the six American and British informants, which led to a few changes, keys and distractors, mainly in the form of paraphrases, were written (two sample items are reproduced in Appendix D).
3 Unfortunately, despite several verifications, one item was found to be missing from the final version at a stage when it was too late for correction. The scores on the complex units tests are therefore out of 59.
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Subjects and administration

Four groups of French advanced learners of English took part in the study. Group 1 was made up of 91 first-year students studying English at the Universite Lumiere, Lyons, France. These are specialist students, i.e., English is their main subject; they studied English for 7 years in secondary schools at the rate of 3 to 5 hours a week. Group 2 included 75 third-year students. Both groups took the two tests at 1-week intervals during normal class time. Group 3 was comprised of 36 teacher trainees at the Institut Universitaire de Formation des Maitres de PAcademie de Lyon (IUFM). This is not the place to explain in great detail how French secondary schoolteachers are recruited and trained, but these students are graduates and have passed competitive examinations for the French Civil Service for which preparation takes an extra year of study. They are therefore in their fifth year of higher studies; in addition, most of them have spent a year in Britain or the United States as teaching assistants.4 These students took the two tests in one session. Group 4 included 34 secondary schoolteachers who are part-time teacher trainers and advisers for the IUFM. Only subjects with more than 10 years' professional experience were asked to participate. The two tests were mailed out to all the IUFM teacher trainers, who were guaranteed anonymity, and the return rate was approximately two-fifths.5 A group of 57 English nativespeaking undergraduate students enrolled in English classes at Purdue University served as native controls. They took the two tests in one session.
Results
Group statistics are presented in Table 1 and graphically in Figure I. 6 The improvement of the learners' scores with level of study was examined by means of an ANOVA for repeated measures, with level as the independent variable and rare word and complex lexical unit scores as the dependent variables. Inspection of Table 1 shows that there are large differences in variance between the groups, and that the distribution of scores for
4 It should be noted that the French university system is highly selective, though not at entry point: Although anyone with a final secondary degree (baccalaureat) may enroll in a language department, there are examinations with high failure rates at the end of each academic year, so that graduates are the survivors of a long selection process. The students in groups 1 through 3 are therefore not strictly comparable in terms of general academic ability. 5 The return rate was actually higher, since the tests were mailed out to all the teacher trainers as we had no knowledge of their number of years in the profession. 6 The almost identical average scores of the native speakers on the two tests constitute a serendipitous outcome.

TABLE I . GROUP STATISTICS (ALL SS)
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Group Rare words mean s.d. Complex units mean s.d. Group 1 2 3 4 5
1 2.73 2.83 5.24 3.90
2 8.44 5.31 8.64 4.70
3 21.83 9.10 16.42 8.54
4 39.24 10.59 29.85 9.93
5 36.65 9.57 36.68 9.05
lst-year students 3d-year students teacher trainees experienced teachers U.S. undergraduates
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OU
en
Rare words 0---0 Complex units Natives1 performance: s*
Af\
30
20 10
n U
|
1 2 Group
figure 1 Group means all Ss.
group 1 (first-year students) is clearly nonnormal due to a floor effect. Since ANOVA is robust with respect to these departures from normal conditions provided the cells contain equal numbers of subjects (Guilford &c Fruchter, 1978, p. 284; SPSS, 1988, p. B-158), samples of 34 Ss (the size of the smallest group) were randomly drawn from groups 1 (firstyear students), 2 (third-year students) and 3 (teacher trainees), and the ANOVA performed on the corresponding statistics. The results appear in Table 2. The effects of level, type of items tested and their interaction are all highly significant. Pairwise comparisons also showed that the differences between rare word and complex lexical item scores are highly significant for groups 1 (first-year students), 3 (teacher trainees) and 4
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TABLE 2 . ANOVA FOR REPEATED MEASURES ( 3 4 SS PER GROUP)
Source of variation Sum of squares d.f. Between Ss Level Within Ss Type of score Interaction Level x type Explained Residual Total 36734.77 463.34 1751.95 38950 15202 54152
3 1 3
Mean squares F 12244.93 463.34 583.98 122.63 30.26 38.14
Significance < 0.00001 < 0.0001 < 0.0001
(experienced teachers), but not for group 2 (third-year students) (Fvalues, respectively, 37.95, 15.45,119.28 and .25). These statistics show, somewhat unsurprisingly, a continuous increase in the knowledge of the two lexical unit samples, but also, and more interestingly, that the acquisition of complex units trails behind that of single words, and the gap increases with time. In order to answer the second research question, the average scores for groups 4 (experienced teachers) and 5 (American undergraduate students) were compared. There is no significant difference between the average scores on the rare word test (F = 1.24, p = .47; t = 1.18, p = .239 for 89 d.o.f.), but the 12% difference on the complex lexical units test is highly significant (F = 1.22, p = .51; t = -3.32, p = .001 for 89 d.o.f.). In other words, the most advanced learners in the experiment did not perform differently from the native controls on the rare words task (their mean score was actually higher, but not significantly so), but their performance was inferior in the case of complex lexical items.
Discussion
The discussion will open on a warning note: Any kind of language assessment is performed at a cost. Our discussion of passive vocabulary in the Introduction implied that what is involved is knowledge of a procedural kind. Multiple-choice tests, however - or checklist tests, for that matter constitute overtly metalinguistic tasks, which tend to tap declarative knowledge. They can only very imperfectly take into account the automatic nature of the processes at work in language comprehension and therefore only provide indirect assessment. This should not be lost sight of in the following. The results of the American undergraduates serve as a reminder of a well-known fact: When we speak of native performance, we should never
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forget that this does not imply "perfect" mastery of the language. These native students' average scores were, after all, 6 1 % in the case of rare words and 62% on the complex lexical units test. The first research question was, How does the students' lexical knowledge improve with their level of study? The fact that the two graphs intersect can be simply attributed to the idiosyncrasies of the item samples in the two tests, there being a few more easy items in the complex units test. The very poor performance on both tests of the first-year students of group 1 comes as no surprise, given what we know of the vocabularies of European secondary-school graduates: It is at university that the acquisition of words beyond the first 2,000 really begins. In fact, these students may hardly be considered as advanced as far as lexical knowledge is concerned. The sheer number of words in the lower frequency ranges seems to constitute an obstacle to the acquisition of nativelike status through university studies, however, as even the teacher trainees in group 3 are way below their native counterparts: Their average score is only 60% of that of the American students for rare words. As stated earlier, they are in their fifth or sixth year of higher education, and they are due to take up classroom teaching at the end of their training year. The fact that scores are even lower in the case of complex units (45%) points at these as a major problem in the acquisition of English by nonnatives. This is confirmed by the results of the experienced teachers (group 4). Indeed, the second question addressed in this study was, Can nonnatives reach nativelike proficiency with respect to rare word and complex lexical units? The answer would seem to be yes in the first case and no in the second. Two restrictions should be mentioned with respect to the comparison of native and nonnative scores, however. The native controls and the experienced teachers in group 4 are not exactly comparable; the former are undergraduates, the latter are middle-aged professionals. As vocabulary acquisition continues throughout life - although obviously at a far more moderate rate than in childhood - a strictly equivalent native control group of American secondary school teachers with at least 10 years' experience might have produced a different result. In addition, as we have seen, the teachers in group 4, who participated on a voluntary basis, were motivated individuals in a rather successful category of their profession, and therefore may have performed better than a random sample of teachers. The main point of interest is that nativelike performance was attained in the case of rare words, not in that of complex lexical units. Although these teachers have all spent some time in English-speaking countries (typically, a 1-year period during their studies and many separate stays to a total of several months or years afterward), they live in a non-Englishspeaking country. It may be that constant exposure to the language is
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necessary for nativelike proficiency in the case of complex lexical units but not simple ones. Total amount of exposure to the language is the simplest explanation, but, as the study has shown, reduced exposure does not prevent the acquisition of a nativelike store of rare words, and additional causes must be found. If one examines what kind of exposure to English is available to teachers in France and sought by them, causes for the difference observed may appear. For instance, there is comparatively little occasion for the informal interaction with natives that takes place daily in an English-speaking country, and an important source of complex lexical units, in particular those at a low level of formality, may be lost. The main opportunity for exposure to oral English is noninteractive, and consists mainly of what English-speaking programs are shown on television, and these are few and far between. Although the British press is widely, if not inexpensively, available, teachers would tend to prefer the quality press to the so-called popular newspapers, which actually constitute a far richer source of complex units. Finally, literary fiction, to which many teachers are attracted by taste, may not provide them with much complex vocabulary. Naturally, those are generalizations that do not take individual situations into account. Lack of awareness of the nature and importance of complex units leading to reduced attention to them is another possible cause, which may combine with the other factors.
Conclusion
The aim of specialist language departments is to bring their students as close as possible to the proficiency of native speakers. Very little specific vocabulary teaching takes place in such departments in France - or many other countries - at present: The students' results show that this should be systematically provided. This implies in turn that more reflection on long-term, large-scale vocabulary teaching methodology at advanced levels should be undertaken. The results of this study also confirm the idea that complex lexical units deserve special pedagogical attention, and that learners should have specific strategies to deal with them. (See Lewis, Chapter 13, this volume.) These strategies, which would be of a metacognitive nature, could be of two kinds: awareness strategies and retention strategies. There is no a priori reason why strategies of the latter type should be different from those that have been described for lexical units in general, such as mnemonics, but awareness strategies involve some metalinguistic knowledge. Learners should know a complex unit when they see or hear one, and this in turn implies that we teach them some lexicological facts, such as the nature and categories of complex units, and their behavior in
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discourse. These suggestions, though not identical with the current movement toward the teaching of lexicalized chunks of language, represented, for instance, by Lewis (1993) or Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992), clearly go in the same direction.
Appendix A: List of rare words tested

hefty crony buxom dunk girder garnet quandary yolk oversight worsted squid fad upshot slush elopement fluke berate cog dollop knead 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 shank chime frazzled blob hobnob quagmire cockroach lancet beseech chomp contraption ladle zither rickety armadillo gimlet pew guffaw furlough hearse 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 doe acorn steed askew cur betrothal rudder breeches bladder sludge flunkey smattering whiff cad clout hemp henchman pliers comely puck
4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
Appendix B: Two sample items from the rare words test

quandary A B C D congratulations extortion refusal dilemma knead A B C D burn cut press helper
Appendix C: List of complex lexical units tested

1 2 3 4 5 a busman's holiday red tape a red herring a wet blanket a sitting duck 6 7 8 9 10 a couch potato a chip off the old block a flash in the pan a nest egg a hot potato
170 11 12 13 14 15
Pierre J. L. Arnaud and Sandra /. Savignon 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 to be on the wagon to call it a day to be up the creek to be up in arms to do a double take to be out on a limb to blow the whistle to beat around the bush to be sitting pretty to break even to bring up the rear to bring the house down to do time to get cold feet to pass the buck to jump the gun to kick the bucket to paint the town red to push up the daisies to see eye to eye to sit on the fence to spill the beans to take forty winks to foot the bill blood is thicker than water his/her goose is cooked it's all in the day's work
the silver lining the three R's the last straw a square peg to lead someone up the garden path 16 to give someone a good hiding 17 to bring someone to heel 18 to give something a wide berth 19 to be at loggerheads with someone 20 to take something in stride 21 to set one's sights on something (22: missing item) 23 wide of the mark 24 across the board 25 tongue in cheek 26 for a song 27 out of sorts 28 on/at the double 29 in the sticks 30 by dint of 31 on a shoestring 32 when the chips are down 33 to ring a bell
Appendix D: Two sample items from the complex lexical units test
to be on the wagon A to exploit prostitutes B to be sure to happen C to be a poor artist D not to drink for a song A not seriously B with little money C without real cause D for fun
Rare words, complex lexical units and the advanced learner References
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Q Rare words, complex lexical units and the advanced learner

Pierre J. L. Arnaud and Sandra ]. Savignon

Rare words, complex lexical units and the advanced learner

Pierre /. L. Arnaud and Sandra ]. Savignon

Complex lexical units

Rare words, complex lexical units and the advanced learner

Pierre J. L. Arnaud and Sandra /. Savignon

The tests Rare words

Rare words, complex lexical units and the advanced learner

Complex lexical units

Pierre ]. L. Arnaud and Sandra /. Savignon

Subjects and administration

Rare words, complex lexical units and the advanced learner

1 2.73 2.83 5.24 3.90

2 8.44 5.31 8.64 4.70

3 21.83 9.10 16.42 8.54

4 39.24 10.59 29.85 9.93

5 36.65 9.57 36.68 9.05

Rare words 0---0 Complex units Natives1 performance: s*

figure 1 Group means all Ss.

Pierre /. L. Arnaud and Sandra ]. Savignon

TABLE 2 . ANOVA FOR REPEATED MEASURES ( 3 4 SS PER GROUP)

Mean squares F 12244.93 463.34 583.98 122.63 30.26 38.14

Significance < 0.00001 < 0.0001 < 0.0001

Rare words, complex lexical units and the advanced learner

Pierre ]. L. Arnaud and Sandra J. Savignon

Rare words, complex lexical units and the advanced learner

Appendix A: List of rare words tested

Appendix B: Two sample items from the rare words test

Appendix C: List of complex lexical units tested

Pierre J. L. Arnaud and Sandra J. Savignon

Rare words, complex lexical units and the advanced learner

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