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Description
There is growing concern regarding the high lexical demands imposed by high-stakes English exams on high school students in Vietnam. This study seeks to critically analyze the English graduation exam papers from 2021 to 2023, with a focus on their lexical content. Using the Compleat Lexical Tutor corpus tool, the lexical profiles of these exams are meticulously examined, revealing the distribution of word types, tokens, and word families across various frequency bands. The study also delves into the aspects of word knowledge assessed by these exams, including form-meaning recognition, idioms, and phrasal verbs, and evaluates the overall difficulty of the test items. The findings reveal that the lexical demands in the national exams are inconsistent across the examined years, with a predominant emphasis on high-frequency words and recognition-based knowledge. This raises concerns about the exams' ability to fully assess students' vocabulary breadth and depth, particularly for those with higher proficiency levels. The analysis also points to inadequacies in the design of distractors and test questions, further questioning the exams' effectiveness in differentiating between various proficiency levels. The study concludes by offering recommendations to improve the exams' design, advocating for a more balanced approach that better reflects the complexities of vocabulary knowledge. These suggestions aim to enhance the validity and fairness of the exams, ensuring they provide a more accurate assessment of students' lexical competencies across different proficiency levels.
Key words: vocabulary assessment; corpus analysis
