This special issue of JFLS focuses on what learners know about French words, on how they use that knowledge and on how it can be investigated and assessed.

This article aims (a) to explore the operationalisation and definition of lexical L2 proficiency and related constructs with a view to identifying a set of measures that can adequately capture the dynamics of lexical L2 proficiency development over time, and (b) to shed more light on the development of lexical proficiency in French Foreign Language classes. After a discussion of theoretical, terminological and methodological issues in L2 vocabulary research, we present a longitudinal quantitative study of the lexical development of Dutch-speaking adolescents learning FFL in Dutch-medium schools in Brussels over a three-year period and compare these learners' lexical proficiency in French to native speaker benchmarks.

In this paper we study different aspects of lexical richness in narratives of British learners of French. In particular we focus on different ways of measuring lexical sophistication. We compare the power of three different operationalisations of the Advanced Guiraud (AG) (Daller, van Hout and Treffers-Daller, 2003): one based on teacher judgement, one on ‘le français fondamental 1er degré’ and one on frequency of lexical items. The results show that teacher judgement is a highly reliable tool for assessing lexical sophistication. The AG based on teacher judgements is better able to discriminate between the groups than the other operationalisations. It also works better than Vocabprofil (the French version of Laufer and Nation's (1995) Lexical Frequency Profile).

This article reports on productive vocabulary development by instructed British learners of French over a five-year period (from age 13 to 18). Lexical diversity development was investigated through a semi-guided oral picture-based task. Results show that the students' lexical diversity (as measured by D) did significantly improve throughout the five years showing little sign of slower periods. Overall more noun types were observed than verb types in the composition of the lexicon throughout the study but with a consistent decrease in its proportion after Year 10. Further results using the Limiting Relative Diversity measure indicate that learners vary their use of nouns to a much larger extent than verbs. The discussion focuses on the noun-bias hypothesis and the use of different elicitation tasks.

This paper investigates the scale of vocabulary learning that appears to be common among British foreign language learners of French up to university graduation. These results are compared with historical data and the knowledge learners possessed in previous generations. This is done by comparing current students' vocabulary knowledge with students who studied more than 20 years ago. These comparisons provide very powerful evidence in support of claims made to the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority of a progressive decline in the knowledge of learners and the standard of school examinations over a period of decades.

This article reports on vocabulary learning in French during Year 12 by 150 pupils in 15 English comprehensive schools. Vocabulary progress over two school terms was investigated in the context of learner strategy training that targeted listening and writing. This intervention was carried out in eleven schools and results compared with a comparison group of four schools. Recognition vocabulary and writing vocabulary measures taken during the students' course are compared with listening and writing scores, and examination results. Results suggest that interventions which target listening and writing skills do not lead to significant gains in vocabulary through incidental learning and the deployment of vocabulary in writing tasks. However, it also appears that extra time and effort devoted to developing listening and writing is not at the expense of vocabulary learning.

Our paper examines lexical variation in the spoken French of second language learners and focuses on words referring to the notion of ‘automobile’ (i.e., automobile, auto, voiture, char and machine). Results reveal that while students do follow the native speaker pattern of using the neutral variant auto in most instances, they diverge from native speakers by making no use of the vernacular form char and relatively high use of the prestige variant voiture. The principal external factors that influence variant choice are students' home language and the representation of variants in the input to which students are exposed.