Size matters : a study of English proficiency levels of educated Maltese English speakers through lexical competence

Abstract

There exists a lack of measurable evidence of proficiency levels of English in Malta. This thesis represents a pilot study which examines the potential for measuring the levels of English proficiency of a small cohort of bilingual educated Maltese subjects. In an effort to measure L2 vocabulary depth, breadth and to gain insight into the cohort’s mental lexicon, the research focused on word association in the cohort’s native Maltese and their L2, English. The results of this thesis suggest that further study into the correlation between Maltese and English responses to word association tests are likely to shed light onto the structure of the mental lexicon that holds both languages. However, before such tests can be attempted, this research shows that further development of the tests are needed, especially with regard to the choice of stimulus words in the Maltese word association test, the test format to reduce priming and a revision of the categorization system to suit Maltese/English responses.