摘要：English as a foreign language (EFL) is a global issue that extends to thousands of learners worldwide who share
a similar classroom situation. However, researchers have often considered learners to have homogeneous
linguistic profiles, overlooking the fact that EFL classrooms in primary and secondary education include learners
with different linguistic profiles. Despite the fact that immigrant and non-immigrant students meet every day in
classrooms, little is known about the EFL performance of the former compared to the latter. This paper addresses
this reality, and explores the vocabulary performance of immigrant students, learners of English as an L3,
compared to learners of English as an L2 who had the same course level and were from the same community.
The research questions were twofold:
(1) to ascertain whether there were quantitative differences between L2 and L3 English learners in terms of the
number of words produced by each group, and
(2) to ascertain whether there were qualitative differences in the words produced by the L3 and L2 groups with
regard to (a) the most and least productive prompts for each group, and (b) the number of infrequent words
appearing in the production of each group.
The sample consisted of 14 bilingual students who were learners of English as an L3 and 14 monolingual
learners of English as an L2, respectively, who were in the twelfth year of Spanish secondary education (age
17-18 years old). The data collection instrument was a lexical availability task consisting of six prompts. The
data were lemmatized, coded and analysed by means of WordSmith Tools and the VocabProfile programme. The
results indicated that the L2 group produced a greater number of words and a higher percentage of infrequent
words in the most productive prompt.
关键词：Lexical availability output; English as a third language; immigrant EFL learners; multilingualism in
school contexts; lexical sophistication; lexical frequency profile
