Designing tasks for advanced L2 vocabulary learning through the manipulation of lexical sophistication of reading texts

Material development has long been at the core of language teaching. However, there is still scarcity of ELT materials and research on advanced L2 proficiency. L2 materials have preferably targeted at beginners to upper-intermediate proficiency. Our understanding of advanced L2 abilities was partial even in the last decade (Byrnes, 2004, 2006). However, there is a growing interest in research in advanced L2 proficiency. This paper describes the design and workings of two reading tasks aimed at teaching low-frequency vocabulary to advanced learners. Each task consists of a reading text and a word list, and the words used in the tasks are the same. What makes the tasks different is where the target words are located in the tasks and thus what the learners do with them. A newspaper article was modified to create two reading texts. The guiding criteria behind the set-up of the lexical aspects of these reading texts in these tasks was lexical sophistication, a component of lexical richness which refers to the use of low-frequency words (Read, 2000). One of the texts has a lower value of lexical sophistication (LowText), whereas the other has a higher value (HighText). These texts differ from each other only in the availability of the target low-frequency words in the text body. In the LowText Task, the target low-frequency words are presented to learners in the accompanying word list and the reading text includes the more frequent counterparts of these words. Learners read text and replace the target low-frequency words in the word list with their more frequent counterparts embedded in the text. The HighText Task works in the reverse direction. The paper will discuss the challenges of creating materials for advanced proficiency with implications drawn form the design of the tasks.