The Lexical Profile of the Moroccan National High-stakes Baccalaureate Reading Test Materials: A Corpus-based Approach

Abstract

Lexical profiling studies are concerned with the lexical breadth required to achieve 95% and 98% coverage of various kinds of verbal or textual materials (Webb, 2021). While prior research has concentrated on the lexical load of EFL textbooks (Nguyen, 2020; Sun & Dang, 2020), scarce research has examined the lexical demands of local proficiency tests. This study investigated the lexical profile of Moroccan national reading exams in relation to coverage in Nation’s (2012) BNC/COCA frequency wordlists. To achieve these objectives, a corpus of 10,536 tokens, covering all the reading materials from 2008 to 2022, was compiled. Moreover, the Vocabulary Size Test (Nation & Belgar, 2007) was administered to 72 baccalaureate students to measure their vocabulary size. The findings of an examination utilising the Antwordprofiler and 11 BNC/COCA lists revealed that vocabulary sizes of 3,000 word families and 4,000 word families, including proper nouns, are needed to achieve 97% and 98% coverage rates in the corpus. Additionally, findings of the descriptive statistics showed that the receptive vocabulary size of the respondents (n=72) was 2,015 words. These results showed that Moroccan baccalaureate students’ lexical breadth is insufficient to attain 95% coverage. Implications for vocabulary instruction in Moroccan EFL classrooms are discussed.