A developmental perspective on productive lexical knowledge in L2 oral interlanguage

This article reports on productive vocabulary development by instructed British learners of French over a five-year period (from age 13 to 18). Lexical diversity development was investigated through a semi-guided oral picture-based task. Results show that the students' lexical diversity (as measured by D) did significantly improve throughout the five years showing little sign of slower periods. Overall more noun types were observed than verb types in the composition of the lexicon throughout the study but with a consistent decrease in its proportion after Year 10. Further results using the Limiting Relative Diversity measure indicate that learners vary their use of nouns to a much larger extent than verbs. The discussion focuses on the noun-bias hypothesis and the use of different elicitation tasks.