SVALex: a CEFR-graded Lexical Resource for Swedish Foreign and Second Language Learners

SVALex: a CEFR-graded lexical resource for Swedish foreign and second language learners Thomas Franc¸ois1,3, Elena Volodina2, Ildik´o Pil´an2, Ana¨ıs Tack3 1 Charg´e de recherche FNRS 2 Spr˚akbanken, University of Gothenburg 3 Cental, IL&C University of Louvain thomas.francois1@uclouvain.be, elena.volodina@svenska.gu.se, ildiko.pilan@svenska.gu.se Abstract The paper introduces SVALex, a lexical resource primarily aimed at learners and teachers of Swedish as a foreign and second language that describes the distribution of 15,681 words and expressions across the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). The resource is based on a corpus of coursebook texts, and thus describes receptive vocabulary learners are exposed to during reading activities, as opposed to productive vocabulary they use when speaking or writing. The paper describes the methodology applied to create the list and to estimate the frequency distribution. It also discusses some characteristics of the resulting resource and compares it to other lexical resources for Swedish. An interesting feature of this resource is the possibility to separate the wheat from the chaff, identifying the core vocabulary at each level, i.e. vocabulary shared by several coursebook writers at each level, from peripheral vocabulary which is used by the minority of the coursebook writers. Keywords: CEFR-graded lexicon, Swedish as a second/foreign language, ICALL 1. Introduction When developing a second or foreign language (L2) course, setting vocabulary goals for learners remains a challeng- ing task. Second language acquisition (SLA) research has shown that a reader has to know 95-98% of the run- ning words in a text to understand it correctly (Laufer and Ravenhorst-Kalovski, 2010). Such studies are useful to es- timate the size of the vocabulary needed to read a text, but they do not provide a method to define lexical curriculum for L2 learners. One possible way to address this problem consists in cre- ating vocabulary lists in which each word is located on a proficiency scale. Given the level of a target reader, it is therefore possible to have an estimate of the words he/she is supposed to know. With this in mind, we present a lexical resource, SVALex, aimed not only at learners and teachers of L2 Swedish, but also at lexicographers, L2 test and curriculum developers, as well as researchers within Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning (ICALL). This resource distinguishes itself from the exist- ing similar lists (see section 2.) due to its descriptive na- ture covering the distribution of 15,681 words and expres- sions across a widely used L2 proficiency scale, the Com- mon European Framework of Reference (CEFR) (Council of Europe, 2001). To make sure that the selected lexical items in SVALex are relevant for learners at different levels of language proficiency, we calculate lexical distributions based on COCTAILL, a corpus of L2 coursebooks graded by teachers in compliance with the CEFR scale (Volodina et al., 2014). In section 2., we describe previous work aimed at establish- ing CEFR-graded lists for various languages or adopting an automatic approach to classification of words according to the CEFR. Section 3. details the methodology applied to create SVALex from a CEFR-labeled …

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