SVALex: a CEFR-graded Lexical Resource for Swedish Foreign and Second Language Learners

Thomas François, Elena Volodina, Ildikó Pilán, Anaïs Tack


Abstract
The paper introduces SVALex, a lexical resource primarily aimed at learners and teachers of Swedish as a foreign and second language that describes the distribution of 15,681 words and expressions across the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). The resource is based on a corpus of coursebook texts, and thus describes receptive vocabulary learners are exposed to during reading activities, as opposed to productive vocabulary they use when speaking or writing. The paper describes the methodology applied to create the list and to estimate the frequency distribution. It also discusses some characteristics of the resulting resource and compares it to other lexical resources for Swedish. An interesting feature of this resource is the possibility to separate the wheat from the chaff, identifying the core vocabulary at each level, i.e. vocabulary shared by several coursebook writers at each level, from peripheral vocabulary which is used by the minority of the coursebook writers.
Anthology ID:
L16-1032
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
Month:
May
Year:
2016
Address:
Portorož, Slovenia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Marko Grobelnik, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
213–219
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1032
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Thomas François, Elena Volodina, Ildikó Pilán, and Anaïs Tack. 2016. SVALex: a CEFR-graded Lexical Resource for Swedish Foreign and Second Language Learners. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 213–219, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
SVALex: a CEFR-graded Lexical Resource for Swedish Foreign and Second Language Learners (François et al., LREC 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1032.pdf