ABSTRACT

Chapter 5 examines and juxtaposes empirically two techniques of performance assessment. It reviews the most influential studies which investigated the application of lexical indices to the assessment of L2 learners’ written and spoken production. It discusses results of the projects in which various lexical and phraseological gauges were used to distinguish between performance of L2 learners at different proficiency levels, or of L2 learners and native speakers. The chapter also summarises the studies which applied correlational and regression analyses to examine how lexical measures are related to the assessment of text global and lexical quality performed by human raters.