The lexical content of high-stakes national exams in French, German, and Spanish in England

Surprisingly, little is known about the number and frequency level of words that beginner-to-low-intermediate 16-year-old learners of French, German, and Spanish are expected to know when taking high-stakes national exams in England. This study presents exploratory analyses of the lexical content of the listening and reading tests of these exams, a corpus totaling 116,647 running words. Specifically, it seeks to understand the number and frequency level of words that (a) this demographic seems to be expected to know and (b) could be needed for awarding organizations to create exams year-on-year. Key findings include that the proportion of low(er)-frequency words in the corpus of exam papers seemed large, given the stage of the learners and the purpose of the assessments. Critically, these low(er)-frequency words changed at a high rate between papers, likely incurring a heavy reliance on the lexical inferencing abilities of these relatively inexperienced language learners. Every year, approximately 250,000 16-year-olds in England sit high-stakes exams in French, German, and Spanish. But how many and what kinds of words do these learners need to know to understand the listening and reading exam texts? And how often do these words change year-on-year? This article aims to address these questions by analyzing a corpus of exam papers.