Pilot Study to Create a New Formula for Estimating Vocabulary Grade Level for Students of English as a Foreign Language in Japan

Abstract

This report is to establish a new formula for estimating Vocabulary Grade Level for students of English as a foreign language in Japan. Nowadays, in the internet web application such as "Word Level Checker", you can analyze English texts and get a graded word-level profile such as which 62% of the words belongs to 1,000-word level and 11% to 2,000, 6% to 3,000 and so on. You might think that "What is the use of a detail profile that can figure out the numbers of text's difficulties? How do I apply these results in deciding if it is useful or not for my specific groups?" So we challenged to develop word-level measures to produce a simple and understandable readings such as "This text is 11th grade word-level". Using textbooks of Junior and Senior High School and Eiken tests as criteria for grade level, we created a new Vocabulary Grade Level Formula. It is a very simple linear equation, that is VGL=30.371*H+8.7914, where VGL is an estimated Vocabulary Grade Level and H is a percentage of senior high school level words. And then, we made a test run of it to find points to be improved and got many important hints.