LEXICAL AVAILABILITY OF EFL LEARNERS AT THE END OF SPANISH SECONDARY EDUCATION: THE EFFECT OF LANGUAGE PROGRAM AND PROMPT

Abstract

The present paper looks at lexical availability in two teaching programmes (EOI and EFL) in the last year of Spanish secondary education (4^th ESO). Our main aim is to ascertain whether there are quantitative and qualitative differences in the available lexicon of the two groups of informants. Thus, we have analysed the words retrieved by the two groups in a lexical availability task comprising three traditional and three new prompts (centros de interés). Results show that there are significant quantitative differences between the two groups of informants, in favour of the EOI group. However, we have not found qualitative differences in the first words retrieved by the two groups of informants in response to each prompt in terms of internal frequency, semantic category and word type. Nevertheless, there are important qualitative differences between the traditional and the new prompts as far as semantic category and word type are concerned.