Introduction

V_YesNo is based on the Eurocentres Vocabulary Size Test (EVST; Meara & Jones, 1990), one of the very first programs to come out of the vocabulary research group that developed at Birkbeck College London during the 1980s. The program grew out of a need for some ‘quick and dirty’ tests that could be used to efficiently describe the level of proficiency of L2 speakers taking part in experimental studies. At the time we developed EVST, there were no standard tests of this type. People usually described their experimental participants in terms of how many years of study they had completed, or by using ill-defined descriptions like ‘beginner’ or ‘upper intermediate’. These terms were useful for broadly categorising participants, but they tended to mean different things in different contexts, and were not very useful for discriminating between students who were formally at the same level, but had very different levels of proficiency.

The original EVST program appeared to be a radically innovative approach to vocabulary testing in an L2 at the time it appeared, although it actually borrowed heavily from a methodology which had previously been used by Anderson and Freebody (1981) to test vocabulary in L1 speakers. In reality, the idea that vocabulary might be a good surrogate measure for overall proficiency in a foreign language was not as innovative as it appeared. The idea first crops up in a series of papers by Vivian Henmon, published in The Journal of Educational Psychology early in the 20th century (Henmon, 1917, 1920). Henmon’s work dealt with Latin, but the idea that it might also work for modern foreign languages surfaced again in a thesis by Einar Ryden, briefly reported in an article in The Journal of Educational Psychology in 1948. Ryden did not use imaginary words as a way of correcting for guessing: that idea was sketched out by John Higgins and reported in a paper that appeared in 1995, but was actually based on research carried out in the 1970s (Higgins, 1995).