Design and implementation of a Tourism Vocabulary Test. 
        Alcántar Díaz Carlota 
        Universidad Autonoma de Nayarit 
        Alcantardiaz2005@hotmail.com 
        Linea temática: Proceso de Enseñanza-Aprendizaje de lenguas 
         
        Abstract 
         
        Testing is part of the language teaching and learning process, it is important because it 
        is an instrument that provides teachers with information to assess the students’ language 
        learning progress. Among all the language features teachers should test is vocabulary, 
        that is one of the most important language features developing all four language skills: 
        reading, writing, listening and speaking.  Vocabulary testing is, therefore as important 
        as any other language test provided that the most appropriate type of vocabulary test is 
        applied according to the purpose of vocabulary assessment whether this is the receptive 
        knowledge of a word or the productive knowledge of a word (Nation, 2001). In this 
        presentation we report the design of the Tourism Vocabulary Test which contains 42 
        words selected from a list of 421 words which were obtained from a specialized tourism 
        corpus (Alcantar, 2007). The test was designed to test the tourism vocabulary as part of 
        a research that aimed to find the correlation between reading comprehension of tourism 
        texts and tourism vocabulary and high frequency words ( Alcantar, 2010). The results of 
        the implementation of the Tourism Vocabulary Test show that is a reliable test which 
        can be used to measure tourism vocabulary in further investigations. 
        Key words: Test, Vocabulary, Tourism 
         
         
        1. Introduction: 
         
        Testing vocabulary is as important as testing any other language feature. Vocabulary tests have 
        to meet the same criteria of validity, reliability, and practicality (Nation, 2001). According to 
        Laufer and Goldstein (2004) vocabulary tests depend on the designer’s description of Lexical 
        knowledge.  They  state  that  lexical  knowledge  is  the  addition  of  several  ‘subknowledges’, 
        among them: “knowledge of the spoken and written word form, morphological knowledge, 
        knowledge of word meaning, connotative and associational knowledge and the knowledge of 
        social constraints to be observed in the use of a word” (Laufer and Goldstein, 2004,p.400). 
        Some of these subknowledges are receptive and some others are productive. 
         
        Depending on the purpose of vocabulary assessment, the most appropriate type of vocabulary 
        test should be chosen. It is important to determine the kind of knowledge to be tested, and 
        whether this is the receptive knowledge of a word or the productive knowledge of a word 
        (Nation, 2001). Receptive and productive knowledge require different types of performance 
        from the learners. For instance, receptive knowledge in most cases is related to reading and 
        listening, while productive knowledge of words is more related to writing and speaking skills 
        (Nation, 2001).  
         ‘Different  researchers  recommend  different  vocabulary  tests,  depending  on  their  view  of 
        vocabulary  knowledge,  their  preference  for  a  particular  dimension  of  knowledge  and  their 
        interest in either size or depth’ (Laufer and Goldstein, 2004,p.401). The number of words a 
        learner knows (size of vocabulary) can be measured; this is sometimes referred to as breadth of 
        knowledge, or how well the learner knows a word; it is also known as depth of knowledge 
        (Schmitt, 2000).  
        According to Read (2000) there are three dimensions of the means of testing vocabulary: 1) 
        discrete-embedded, 2) selective-comprehensive and 3) context-independent–context-dependent.  
        The tests of vocabulary in the present research will be as follows: 
        discrete, since we are interested in assessing the knowledge of word meaning separately from 
        assessing reading comprehension,  to be able to establish the relationship between reading and 
        word knowledge, 
        selective, since we are going to measure a selected group of words chosen on a frequency basis; 
        context independent, because we need to test stored knowledge of word meanings without the 
        use of such strategies as guessing from context. These dimensions of testing vocabulary were 
        chosen  because  they  seem  to  be  the  most  appropriate  for  measuring  the  size  of  receptive 
        knowledge.  
         
        The Tourism Vocabulary Test was part of a research which aimed to find the correlation 
        between reading comprehension of tourism text and tourism vocabulary and the correlation 
        between high frequency words and reading comprehension of tourism texts. Hence, this work 
        aims to measure the size of receptive knowledge of distinctively frequent words in the field of 
        tourism. The ability to comprehend word form and meaning will be measured, that is to say, 
        that the subject recognizes the written form of the word and is able to retrieve the appropriate 
        meaning for this word form (Nation, 2001).  
        2. Test design 
        This  test  was  self-designed  since  there  is  no  test  of  tourism  vocabulary  currently  available. 
        Decisions had to be made about all the design issues of the new test. The words used for the 
        design of the Tourism Vocabulary Test were those obtained in a preliminary study in which we 
        surveyed  the  English  reading  needs  of  tourism  workers  in  Mexico,  constructed  a  small 
        representative corpus of the sort of material they read, and extracted a list of 421 words and 
        phrases that are distinctively frequent in occupational tourism English compared with general 
        English (Alcantar Diaz, 2007). 
        The criteria of Schmitt at al. (2001) was followed, as used  for the design of the two new 
        versions of Nation’s test (1983). For the design of the receptive Tourism Vocabulary Test each 
        cluster was written with the following rules in mind: 
        1) The six options in this format are words or phrases, not definitions. 
        2) The definitions are kept short whenever possible. Words are always defined in a tourism-
        related sense. 
        3) Nagy et al (in Schmitt, Schmitt and Clapham 2001) suggest the test should aim to tap into 
        the partial lexical knowledge relevant to reception/reading rather than production. The option 
        words in each cluster are chosen so that they  have different  meanings.  This  facilitates  the 
        subjects in choosing the right option since they are not similar in meaning.  
         4) The target words and distractors are in alphabetical order, and the definitions are in order of 
        length (the shortest definitions first). 
        5) The target words to be defined are selected randomly from the list of most distinctively 
        frequent  words  in  the  Tourism  Corpus  as  compared  with  General  English  (Alcantar  Diaz, 
        2007). First, forty-two target words were selected (every tenth word from the list of 421). To 
        compose the test, these were grouped into 14 clusters of 6 words of similar frequency in the list 
        of  the  most  distinctively  frequent  words  in  the  field  of  tourism  (3  target  words  and  three 
        distractors). 
        6) The words used in the definitions are always more frequent than the target words. (In the 
        present test, according to the Compleat Lexical Tutor with the classic profiler option, of the 198 
        words contained in the definitions 84.34 per cent belong to the K1 words (frequent words from 
        1, to 1000), 10.10 per cent belong to the K2 words (frequent words from  1001 to 2000) and 
        5.58 per cent belong to the Academic Word List) 
        7) As many as possible target words in each cluster begin with different letters and do not have 
        similar orthographic forms. Similarities between the words and word definitions were avoided 
        whenever possible.  
        8) The same words should not occur in different options 
        (Adapted from Schmitt, et al., 2001). 
         
        In order to keep the progression of words based on their frequency, ‘part of speech’ was not 
        considered, as in Schmitt’s version. In his version, ‘the words from the stratified sample tended 
        to fall into a 3 (noun): 2 (verb): 1 (adjective) ratio. This ratio was maintained in the test, with 
        each  section  containing  three  noun  clusters,  two  verb  clusters  and  one  adjective  cluster’ 
        (Schmitt et al., 2001, p. 58). We did not follow this method in this test; since the target words 
        were mainly nouns and verbs, they were only 42, and it was practically impossible to replicate 
        Schmitt’s design. If Schmitt’s design had been replicated then the progression of frequency 
        would have been affected, and the test could have failed to test the full range of levels.