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A Longitudinal Study of Receptive Mid-Frequency Vocabulary Knowledge in Czech Advanced Learners of English
Buchal, Kryštof ; Gráf, Tomáš (advisor) ; Luef, Eva Maria (referee)
The thesis deals with the knowledge and development of receptive mid-frequency vocabulary in 18 Czech learners of English, described by their teachers as advanced and more proficient in English in comparison to their other English class peers. For the purposes of the study, a serial multiple-choice vocabulary test was used. The test consists of 96 lexical items belonging to four frequency bands. The participants took the test three times within 1 year with approximately 6-month intervals between the individual test sessions. Globally, the learners showed better knowledge of more frequent words. However, only a minority of the learners had a sufficient command of the vocabulary in the individual frequency bands except for the most frequent level, where mastery was reached by at least a half of the learners in all the three sessions. As for lexical development, generally there was a significant improvement in the knowledge of less frequent words. Some of the participants reached gains stronger than 10% over the 1-year period, others showed gains weaker than 10%, some even reached lower scores in the final session. Given the amount of time that the students spend in English classes at school, more of them could be expected to show a significant improvement. Nevertheless, the results of the study...
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Lexical Replacements of Romance Origins in Middle English
Buchal, Kryštof ; Tichý, Ondřej (advisor) ; Čermák, Jan (referee)
and key words This BA thesis focuses on selected words of French origin adopted into English during the Middle English period. The theoretical part deals with the research carried out in the field of French borrowings in the Middle English period so far. The research part focuses on lexical borrowings that replaced their corresponding equivalents of Germanic origin. The words were chosen from the Oxford English Dictionary, which also provided the information on etymology, various orthographic forms, current usage frequency and classification into semantic fields. The classification was used to find corresponding equivalents of French or Germanic origin. The list of orthographic variants of the words was verified and complemented with the Middle English Dictionary. Next, a corpus including English prose and verse from the period between 1150 and 1500 was used to analyze the usage and changes in the usage frequency of the replacements and the replaced words throughout this period. Key words: lexical replacements, French borrowings, Romance borrowings, Middle English
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