Dear Anna,

Speaking of guidelines for the students, I think one initial step is training them in providing definitions. A good set of examples in which students get the idea of what you want them to perform in written would be a good start. Also, showing them a video of people doing the task would guarantee to a good extent a successful completion of the task

Jorge

I'm not sure if this would fit with the process you have in mind but I've found, working with groups of young learners on their acquisition of new vocabulary that they particularly enjoyed playing a mime game to illustrate meaning - perhaps your students could use mime to elicit a definition for the words you've identified.

In order to provide the clearest sugesstion, could you clarify what the primary purpose of the test is? Is it meant to measure their ability to express a definition concisely , or to co-construct the definition through group collaboration, or something else? Also, are these words in the students‘ first language or is it second language related? Also, how familiar are the students with these words: Have they been learned previously or are they using context, word features, and group collaboration to make guesses about what newly-met words possibly mean?

Thank you for your question. The test we are going to construct will be part of the follow-up assessment in this vocabulary intervention project: https://www.researchgate.net/project/Teaching-and-assessment-of-children-with-limited-Danish-vocabulary.

Some of the children have been taught the meanings of some of the words in the test, some have not. The pretesting and the posttesting included individual assessment where we orally provided examples of definitions and asked each child to give oral explanations of the meanings of some of the taught words as well as untaught words, and we found large instructional effects. Unfortunately, for the follow up-assessment, we cannot afford to test the children individually again, and therefore we have to test the children in groups of approx. 10 children. When we asked the children individually to provide oral defintions of one word a time during the pre- and post testing, some of the children provided very long and somewhat fuzzy explanations for some of the words, but still received some received credit for some of those explanations if they contained certain central elements. I am afraid that such children may not be able to demonstrate their actual knowledge of the meanings of words when they have to do it in writing rather than orally. Therefore, I am looking for ways to guide the children to provide as short and clear written definitions as possible.

The children are not going to collaborate during the testing - they have to define the words individually in writing after we have provided them with instruction and examples of definitions and made them practise with a few words. It is this initial instruction with examples of definitions and practice I am looking for inspiration for.

Apologies for the late response—I’m out of town this week and have limited connectivity.

Based on your reply it sounds like you want to elicit more concise responses in writing and avoid the longer, fuzzier responses you got in the previous oral iteration of the study.

If it is possible to provide several model examples of words that aren’t being tested, this might help draw attention to the level of detail you want to elicit. Also, you might avoid too many words in any one session as writing can be more laborious than speaking—otherwise they might tire out or lose patience with the task (children especially!). I’m not sure about first language teaching, but in L2, most vocabulary studies introduce usually no more than around two dozen new words in a given session, and even that is pushing it. Finally, it might be a good idea to consider how being tested in a group settting might impact results if you intend to compare these with your previous individual study data.

Thank you very much for your helpful answer. This is much in line with our own ideas and considerations. I would be very grateful if you or anyone else have references to published papers describing vocabulary assessment where students should provide written definitions of words.

I'm not sure how helpful these would be since they are intended for L2 learners, but these might be useful for what you're doing:

Laufer, H., Kill, K., & Congdon, P. (2004). Size and strength: do we need both to measure vocabulary knowledge, Language Testing, 21, 202-226.

Laufer, B. & Goldstein, Z. (2004). Testing vocabulary knowledge: Size, strength, and computer adaptiveness, Language Learning, 54, 399-436.

Finally, while most L2 vocabulary studies measure meaning through multiple choice format (since it is easier to quantify correct and incorrect responses), for my PhD thesis, I elicited definitions of newly met L2 English idioms and these were presented and learned in the students' L1 (Japanese). If you go to my publication list, it is "Chapter 4: Metaphorical elaboration through pictures and L2 meaning recall of idioms" of my thesis (I do have a more condensed version, but it's currently under review).

Thank you so much for your helpful answer and the references. I am looking forward to reading your thesis.

Just a thought: Definition is often quite a vague term to children (and even adults) as there a many different ways to define. One may in and exclude another may give a prototye example and start from there, another may give more than one definition to capture all aspects. So it may help to rephrase the instruction to ask for one or more specific ways to define: "Tell me the most important things about XY" "What is XY and what is not XY?" "What does the word XY mean in a sentence? What in this sentence? (if you have an example given) "What does XY refer to in daily live?"