Document Type
Article
Abstract
Lexical proficiency in a second language (L2) has long been effectively assessed through the measurement of various lexical indices, or textual characteristics that act as observable indicators of such conceptual categories as lexical richness, diversity, sophistication, and fluency. While many studies have established links between these lexical characteristics and levels of overall language proficiency, languages other than L2 English rarely feature in such research. The current study addresses this gap by investigating a less commonly studied language, Russian, while paying specific attention to the operationalization of proficiency through an American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages Proficiency Guidelines-based procedure. The study analyzes eight lexical proficiency indices in a corpus of essays written by learners of Russian at different proficiency levels. Our analyses demonstrate that seven indices (i.e., word length in letters, word length in syllables, word length in morphemes, unique tokens per text, unique lemmas per text, and measure of textual lexical diversity for tokens and for lemmas) changed significantly with the increase in proficiency. Only one index—the pro-portion of content versus function words—did not reliably track the increase in proficiency. The findings confirm the usefulness of lexical proficiency measures in tracking lexical development in L2 Russian and increase the repertoire of these indices for L2 Russian.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Publication Info
Published in The Modern Language Journal, Volume 109, Issue 2, 2025, pages 344-364.
APA Citation
Kisselev, O., Kopotev, M., & Vakhranev, A. (2025). Assessing lexical proficiency in Russian as a second language using indices of lexical sophistication, diversity, and fluency. The Modern Language Journal, 109(2), 344–364.https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12998
Rights
© 2025 The Author(s). The Modern Language Journal published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of National Federation of Modern Language Teachers Associations, Inc.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.