Testing and Assessing English Word-Formation

The paper discusses the testing/assessment of word-formation skills in thresholdlevel (B1) learners. To determine the suitability and use of productive gap-fill exercises at this level, an example of a word-formation exercise is addressed from the following perspectives: word frequency (corpus data), morphological complexity (morpheme types and wordformation processes), syntactic environments (typical sentence and/or phrase patterns), analysis of statistical data (facility values) and test-takers’ errors. The text also addresses some implications of the findings for the instruction of lexis.