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THE LANGUAGE TEACHER: 35.1 Jy / Fby 2011

The Language Teacher reaDerS ForuM | 35

Keywords

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Vocabulary.

John ReadPau lNationPaul Meara302(the word-associates test)Assessing Vocabulary

An interview withJohn Read

daniel dunkley

aichi Gki uivsityDaniel Dunkley (DD): Dr. Read, could you tell me how youmoved from studying Crow Indian language in the USA towriting a major book on vocabulary assessment (Read, 2000)?

John Read (JR): The rst questionis how I got to be doing researchinto Crow Indian languagemaintenance. That grew out ofmy experience as a student. Inthe period immediately after myMasters degree, at the beginningof my teaching career in the early70s, I was involved in the earlystages of the Maori language andculture revival, and developedan interest in sociolinguistics and

bilingual education. These twoaspects came together, so I went tothe University of New Mexico to

do my doctoral work with Bernard Spolsky. There was a conu-ence of interests - the academic interest in sociolinguistics, andthe political and cultural interest in the revival and revitaliza-tion of indigenous languages. The Crow reservation turned outto be a very interesting place to do research because there was ahigh level of maintenance among the members of the tribe. Thisran counter to expectations; you would have predicted, as withmost other American tribes, a high degree of language shifttowards English.

DD: What happened after your time in New Mexico?

JR: After my research there I had a job at the Regional LanguageCentre in Singapore for ve years. I think for someone in ap-plied linguistics at that time I had an unusually strong back-

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THE LANGUAGE TEACHER oli 36

TLT reades Foum

ground in research methodology. The reason forthis was my experience in New Mexico. Becausethey didnt actually have a doctoral program inApplied Linguistics at the University of NewMexico, I went through the College of Education

and did a number of courses on research meth-ods that way. The job in Singapore involved bothResearch Methodology and Language Testing.Id done some work on testing at New Mexico,and in fact two of the most prominent languagetesters of the seventies, Bernard Spolsky and

John Oller, were both there at that time. Thoughmy own research did not primarily focus on test-ing, I realize in retrospect that I picked up quite alot through working with those two professors.

DD: So you nally returned to New Zealand?

JR: Yes, after ve years in Singapore a lecture-ship came up at my old university in Wellington,Victoria University. So when I went back there Iguess I brought together two things: on the onehand that interest and expertise Id developedin testing, particularly in Singapore, and on theother hand an interest in vocabulary. Vocabularywas a traditional strength of the English Lan-guage Institute in Victoria. I guess currently the

most famous vocabulary specialist there is PaulNation. Through him I developed an interestin vocabulary tests in particular. And of course,even though hes not a testing person, he hasdeveloped a number of tests in his career, mostfamously the Vocabulary Levels Test.

DD: What kind of research did you do in Wel-lington?

JR: One of my early studies, which actually ap-

peared in the RELC Journal (Read, 1988), lookedat Nations vocabulary levels test. I administeredit at the beginning and the end of an intensivepre-university course as we used to call it. Thesedays, it would be called an EAP (English forAcademic Purposes) course. I looked at whetherthe vocabulary levels test could show any kindof growth in vocabulary over that three-monthperiod. Another thing I looked at was the scalingof the different frequency levels in the test. Thereare ve different levels of vocabulary knowl-

edge: 2000, 3000, 5000, university level and 10,000words. There are just 18 questions for each level,and I dened mastery as 16 correct answers out of

18. I wanted to see the extent to which when thestudents achieved a mastery of the 3000 wordlevel, whether we could assume that theydalso mastered the 2000 word level. And if theyachieved mastery of the university word level

(specialist academic vocabulary), had they alsomastered the 5000, 3000 and 2000 word levels? Ifound broadly there was that pattern. However,there was one exception, which has been foundin other studies as well. We had a number ofSpanish speaking Latin American students whowere coming for post-graduate study at a NewZealand university; they didnt follow thatpattern very clearly. The reason is, of course, thata lot of the less frequent vocabulary in Englishis from Latin or French. So speakers of Romance

languages dont follow that sequence, that youwould certainly get with Japanese learners, themore frequent the word is in the language themore likely they are to know the word. So thatwas the basis for that analysis that I did.

DD: How exactly were you asked to write yourvocabulary assessment book, which was pub-lished in 2000?

JR: I was actually rst asked to write the book in

1991. My rst sabbatical after I went to Welling-ton was in 1990, and I went to Britain. I dividedmy time between two places. First I spent threemonths at Birkbeck College, London University.There I worked with Paul Meara, whos one ofthe big names in vocabulary studies. He was

just nishing his time there before he moved toUniversity College Swansea in Wales to establishhis famous doctoral program there. It was whileworking with him that I developed the test Iguess Im best known for, the word associates

test (Read, 1993). Meara at that time had beenworking on the concept of word association. Heused the standard word association test whereyou give the language users a series of stimuluswords and ask them to respond, either orally orin written form, with the rst word that comesinto their head. There are well-established normsfor native speakers. For example, in the 1960sand 70s there was a lot of work done with nativespeaking children and adults which showedthat the kind of responses they gave were fairlystable and consistent from one native speaker toanother. But Meara and I found that that wasntthe case for second language learners. In fact,

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THE LANGUAGE TEACHER: 35.1 Jy / Fby 2011 37

dunkley:An interview with John Read

Meara has just published a book called ConnectedWords, which pulls together six or seven articleshes published over the years. His theme ishow word association of various kinds can giveinsight into the nature of the second language

lexicon. Ive just written a review of it.

DD: What was new about your Word AssociatesTest?

JR: Our innovation was the notion that instead ofasking learners to supply responses to a word-association task, why not give them a selectionof words to choose from? Originally there wereeight words four of the words are associatedwith the target word and four arent. Your task

is to pick which of the words are associatedeither paradigmatically or syntagmatically. Soit includes not only aspects of the meaning ofthe word or synonym, but also words that cancollocate with the target word.

DD: Did you meet Alderson, the series editor atthat time?

JR: Yes. After that three months in London I wentto Lancaster for another two to three months atthe invitation of Charles Alderson. It so hap-

pened that at that time he was putting togetherthe original proposal for that series of books inwhich mine appears. I didnt actually see muchof Charles while I was there for various reasons,

but he did attend a seminar I gave to graduatestudents just before I left. He was looking forsomeone who was not only a language tester, butalso had a strong interest in vocabulary, so I wasin the right place at the right time. But it tookquite a long time for the series to be accepted. I

think in 1992 I wrote a couple of draft chapters,and then in 95 the series was accepted and Iwrote a more formal proposal to get the contractfrom Cambridge. I wrote another two chaptersthen.

DD: Who is Assessing Vocabulary for and what isits message?

JR: Its intended audience is both test developersand classroom language teachers. I looked attheory and research on one hand and vocabulary

testing on the other. The theory is what we knowabout vocabulary knowledge and use in additionto what we know about the ways vocabulary can

be measured. Theory and practice are integratedby my framework for vocabulary assessment.Also, one chapter is devoted to four case studies,including the TOEFL test, and I nally discussnew directions for vocabulary assessment,

including computer applications.

DD: Who else inuenced you in the 90s?

JR: In the long process of writing the book Imet up with Carol Chapelle. Of course testingis one of her areas, and at that time she wasquite interested in vocabulary testing. I thinkshed come at it from her work with the clozeprocedure and C-tests. That collaboration withher was very helpful for me in developing my

ideas. It provided a more sophisticated view oflanguage assessment than I could have had if thebook had in fact appeared in 94 or 95 (Read &Chapelle, 2001).

DD: How is vocabulary testing viewed byacademic language testers?

JR: I guess from the time I rst got involved invocabulary testing I used to be a bit uncomfort-able about talking about my work at languagetesting conferences. A focus on vocabulary

seemed so much out of the mainstream at thetime. Language testing had moved decisivelyinto communicative and task-based testing ofspeaking and writing skills, and that was whereall the leading edge research was being done. Sofocusing on vocabulary seemed to be rather oldhat. In some ways vocabulary tests were the kindof classic discrete-point test which everybodythought had been discredited in the 70s. It wasfashionable to rubbish Robert Lado without

necessarily having read his book. Its also trueto say that for a long time, in the 70s and 80s,the vocabulary researchers like Meara, Nationand Laufer were a fairly lonely bunch. One bigchange that occurred during the 90s and thiscentury is that vocabulary studies, generally,and not just vocabulary testing have come muchmore to the fore. But, if you look at SLA, al-though there is more focus on vocabulary tests, Ithink there is still a sense that its not really at thecore of SLA research compared with the study

of syntax and morphology. Thats a point that Ipicked up in my review of Mearas book.

DD: How about the future?