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This study aimed to assess the construct validity of Pecorari, Shaw and Malmström's (2019) Academic Vocabulary Test - Form 1 (AVT1). To this end, it first employed Rasch-based statistical evidence generated from the test responses of 989 high-school and university students in Vietnam to inspect five major aspects of Messickian construct validity: Content, Substantive, Structural, Generalizability and External (Messick, 1995). It then moved on to thematically analyze the data collected from the follow-up focus-group interviews with 50 students randomly selected from the test-takers to detect any emerged patterns in their actual engagement with the test. Results from Rasch-based analyses showed that AVT1 could sufficiently measure the target ability - receptive academic vocabulary breadth - of an overwhelming 889 out of the 989 test-takers (90%) and there were seven statistically distinct groups of item difficulty in the empirical item hierarchy. In general, test items and test-takers performed as predicted by a priori hypotheses and displayed good fit to the Rasch model. Principal Component Analysis indicated that the test items formed a fundamentally unidimensional construct, suggesting that the test only measured one meaningful dimension, presumably the receptive academic vocabulary breadth. The evidence for the invariance in item calibration and person measure as well as the test's external reliability enabled the generalization of score properties and interpretations across populations, settings, and tasks. Results from the interview data analyses revealed that AVT1 did allow some room for guessing effects, which was predicted by the test developers. These findings altogether suggest that this test can be a useful tool to gauge receptive academic vocabulary breadth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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An ethnic gap in education is prevalent around the world. This remains the case in Vietnam, a country that has achieved phenomenal economic growth and raised the educational attainment of the public. This paper examines the impact of language policy reorientation represented by the textbook supply program in Vietnam on the ethnic gap in children's learning measured by a vocabulary test. Applying difference‐in‐differences estimation to the Young Lives data between 2006 and 2015, we show that the program became more effective in narrowing the ethnic gap as the education policy became reoriented toward ethnic minority children. A causal mediation analysis reveals that increased study time is possibly a moderate mediator through which the language policy reorientation helped narrow the ethnic gap for the young cohort over and above the direct impact, but this was not the case for the old cohort. This paper, therefore, alludes to the importance of delivering learning materials carefully designed for the target group to bring about meaningful behavioral changes. It also underscores the importance of teaching in the right context, corroborating the findings from recent studies on teaching at the right level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Purpose: Using mnemonic strategies is one of the useful ways to help students memorize and retrieve vocabulary effectively in learning English. This paper mainly focuses on promoting mnemonic strategies to EFL students' vocabulary learning. Though some research in this field has been conducted, there have been hardly any specific studies on using mnemonic strategies to improve vocabulary learning ability for English major pre-intermediate level students at a university of foreign languages in Vietnam. The study aims to investigate the benefit of mnemonic strategies in vocabulary learning for EFL students. Methodology: This study was designed as quasi-experimental research, employing a mixed-method approach to gather data. 90 respondents from a university in the centre of Vietnam were recruited in the study using a simple random sampling method. A 5-point Likert scale questionnaire of 20 items, a vocabulary test and semi-structured interview questions were the research instruments used in the study. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 25.0 was used for analyzing the quantitative data. The responses from semi-structured interviews were analysed in theme. Findings: The results of the study showed that both teacher-provided mnemonic strategies and studentgenerated strategies could help students memorize vocabulary effectively. However, students who were creative and methodical in applying their own mnemonic strategies performed better at memorizing vocabulary. Also, those students who applied mnemonic strategies had better results in the vocabulary tests than the others. Contributions: The study concludes that mnemonic strategies including spatial grouping, keyword method, the use of rhyme, story method, acronym, etc. to memorize and retrieve vocabulary has potential to be applied with EFL adult students as a new vocabulary teaching method. The research is expected to contribute to university administrators, EFL instructors, as well as university students to encourage and apply mnemonic strategies for improving EFL students' vocabulary learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the development and validation of a Vietnamese bilingual version of the Vocabulary Size Test — a test which measures written receptive vocabulary size. The test can be used to measure the English vocabulary size of Vietnamese learners of English. A learner’s total vocabulary size is calculated by multiplying their test result by 100. The research adds to our knowledge of vocabulary size testing in the following ways. First, it shows that a bilingual version of a monolingual test performs in much the same way as the monolingual test, distinguishing learners of different proficiency levels and returning lower scores at later levels of the test. Second, it shows that every level of the test should be sat, otherwise there will be a considerable underestimation of learners’ vocabulary sizes. This suggests limitations to the previously accepted assumption that learners’ vocabulary growth can be largely related to word frequency. Third, it shows that bilingual tests are feasible alternatives to more challenging and time-consuming monolingual tests. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]