La taille du vocabulaire chez des apprenants de français de niveau universitaire : Combien de mots français connaissent des étudiants de différents niveaux ?

Sammanfattning: This is a study of vocabulary size that examines the numbers of French words that students on different university levels know. It also compares how the vocabulary size differs depending on the students’ levels of acquisition. The method we use is the Vocabulary Size Test “TTV”, (Test de la Taille du Vocabulaire) that measures the number of French words on different levels of frequency, where the maximum number of words to obtain is 10 000. We have created two groups on different levels of acquisition at the University of Stockholm: group 1 consists of first semester students, and group 2 of a mixture of students from third and fourth semester of French. In the results, we can see that group 2 has obtained a significantly higher number of words on the test than group 1, namely 8 224 verses 6 831. Further we have found that not all students follow the predicted pattern when it comes to word frequency, which predicts that the largest amount of words is to be found in the highest frequency word span. We discuss advantages and inconveniences of different vocabulary size tests, and explain the importance of word frequency in this type of study.