ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at different ways that test designers have selected vocabulary items for vocabulary size tests, the types of knowledge these tests have attempted to measure, and the limitations of each measure. For native speakers, measures of vocabulary size can help determine the feasibility of directly teaching vocabulary. One of the earliest published studies on receptive vocabulary size was by Andy Kirkpatrick, who estimated how many words he knew in a dictionary. The earliest published report on productive vocabulary size was by E. S. Holden. In this study, Holden used a dictionary to count the words he thought he could use or had used, arriving at a size of 33, 456 words. The Eurocentres test uses a yes/no format with some non-words to ensure honest answering. The Picture Vocabulary Size Test is a new test designed by the authors to measure the receptive knowledge of word families in young, pre-literate first and second language learners of English.
