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A lexical and morphological profiler for beginner/low-intermediate learners of French, German, and Spanish with English as an L1
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Description: Vocabulary profiling of corpus texts is an important step in the development and modification of pedagogic materials and tests for target learner audiences. While widely adopted in the analysis of English texts, vocabulary profiling is largely unused in the analysis of non-English texts, likely due to the lack of suitable resources (word lists and tools) available to support it. Currently, the three best known vocabulary profiling tools are Range (Heatley et al., 2002), AntWordProfiler (Anthony, 2022), and VocabProfilers (Cobb, 2020). Range and VocabProfilers are primarily designed for profiling with English word lists, and while AntWordProfiler can be used to profile texts of any language, its default setup is optimised for English. Another problem is that most reference word lists (in any language) use (f)lemmas or word families as the unit of counting. These units assume that if learners know a headword, they will also be able recognise its full set of inflected and derived forms. Such an assumption is questionable when applied to highly inflected and declined languages like French, German, and Spanish, especially in the context of beginner and low-intermediate learning environments. MultiLingProfiler (Finlayson et al., 2021), is a free, online vocabulary profiling tool primarily designed to assist UK-based teachers, Awarding Organisations, and materials developers in checking the suitability of written texts and listening transcripts for inclusion in lessons, assessments and publications pertaining to GCSE-level Spanish, French, and German. In this presentation, we introduce features of MultilingProfiler that support the development and analysis of materials for this learner group, for example, a flexible unit of counting that allows users to exclude rare and complex inflectional forms and include derivatives that are frequent and transparent to speakers of English; a ‘cognates’ feature that highlights words with identical forms and meanings in English and the L2 cognates, and curriculum-based profiling aligned with the new GCSE.