Abstract
The goal of this study was to describe how underlying vocabulary knowledge manifests into vocabulary usage, and in turn, how usage predicts writing quality among adult basic education (ABE) learners. ABE learners were administered tasks that measured vocabulary knowledge, in the forms of both vocabulary breadth and depth. Participants were also given a composition writing task, and these samples were evaluated for overall writing quality and vocabulary usage. A mediating model was constructed to describe the relationships among variables. This model indicates that vocabulary depth is predictive of writing quality through the mediating variable of vocabulary usage after controlling for the direct contribution of vocabulary breadth. We found no evidence that vocabulary breadth contributes to writing quality when controlling for vocabulary depth and vocabulary usage. The results of the study reveal important relationships among vocabulary knowledge and vocabulary usage in written work that warrants further investigation in developing learners.
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Research reported in this publication was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R15HD067755. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
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This study was reviewed and approved by the Internal Review Board of Mount Holyoke College. The authors certify that the study was performed in adherence to the ethical standards established by the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki. The authors wish to extend their most profound gratitude to the research assistants who tirelessly coded the compositions analyzed in this study. Without your many hours of hard work, this project would not have been possible.
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Lavigne, C.S., Tremblay, K.A. & Binder, K.S. It’s in the Way That You Use It: How Vocabulary Knowledge and Usage Predict Writing Quality Among Adult Basic Education Learners. J Psycholinguist Res 51, 1023–1041 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-022-09877-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-022-09877-5