This project explores receptive knowledge of academic vocabulary in L2 Spanish learners at the university level, and the effects of this knowledge in textual comprehension. Four main goals of this project are: 1) to develop a corpus of academic language in Spanish, 2) to develop an academic test that considers the polysemic nature of these words, 3) to develop textual comprehension tests, and 4) to compare knowledge of the most frequent words in Spanish with knowledge of the most frequent academic words.  

The practical applications of the academic corpus, the vocabulary and comprehension tests, and the conceptual findings are aiming to improve vocabulary instruction and assessment of vocabulary. These findings will be helpful both for students learning Spanish-related majors in non-Spanish speaking countries and those studying abroad in Spanish speaking countries.