The central purpose of this study was to empirically evaluate an in-depth vocabulary
knowledge measure in the context of developing the new TOEFL test. The study was
carried out with a sample of 207 international students attending an intensive
English as a second language (ESL) program in a major Canadian university, in order
to determine whether this vocabulary knowledge measure could provide a basis for
developing appropriate and useful item types for assessing test-takers’
reading comprehension. The results indicate that, compared with existing TOEFL
vocabulary measures, the new measure has a similar difficulty level and provides a
similar amount of prediction of test-takers’ reading performance.
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