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home / papers / 2026 / GerVLPro: A CEFR-Graded Vocabulary List of L2 Learners' Productive Vocabulary in German

GerVLPro: A CEFR-Graded Vocabulary List of L2 Learners' Productive Vocabulary in German

Written for the Research library (claude-opus-5-5) from the paper text, in our own words: the license "CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)" does not allow redistributing the text itself. Original — aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.935.pdf

Summary

Graded vocabulary lists (GVLs) aligned with the CEFR guide the order of vocabulary learning and support CALL tools such as essay scoring and exercise generation. Most German GVLs, however, are prescriptive: experts or textbooks define what learners should know, and almost all of them cover only receptive vocabulary. The authors address this gap with GerVLPro, a descriptive list of the words German L2 learners actually produce. They pooled the available CEFR-annotated German learner corpora, about 1.39 million tokens across 5,631 texts. Each lemma–POS item was assigned a level with a normalized share-based method, and every entry was checked by hand. GerVLPro was then compared with seven established GVLs and six frequency lists, and the authors also tested whether Gpt-4o and Gpt-5 can predict its levels. The resources share much of their vocabulary, yet their level assignments agree with GerVLPro only weakly to moderately. Both LLMs perform worse than most GVLs. The results suggest that existing lists, frequency data, and LLMs do not capture how productive vocabulary develops, so learner-based resources are needed.

Key points

  • GerVLPro contains 4,015 lemma–POS entries: A1 611, A2 1,134, B1 903, B2 1,103, C1 249, C2 15. Code and data are released at github.com/noahmanu/gervlpro.
  • The comparison resources include the GVLs DaFLex, Lingster, Aspekte neu, Profile deutsch (receptive and productive), Goethe Zertifikat and Telc. The frequency lists include dlexDB, DeReWo, Subtlex-de, Leipzig Corpora, Google Ngrams and the Routledge Frequency Dictionary.
  • Level agreement was evaluated only for A1–B2, because the authors consider general-purpose grading above B2 doubtful.
  • Kendall's τb between GerVLPro and the other GVLs mostly falls between about .34 and .40, but Aspekte reaches only .09. For the frequency lists, τb ranges from roughly .08 to .27.
  • In the LLM experiments, Gpt-4o and Gpt-5 reach Kendall's τb of about .29, Cohen's κ of about .06–.11 and QWK of about .24–.31.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/3cokpao2odep

@inproceedings{michael2026gervlpro,
  title = {{GerVLPro: A CEFR-Graded Vocabulary List of L2 Learners' Productive Vocabulary in German}},
  author = {Michael, Noah-Manuel and Hülsing, Anna and Horbach, Andrea},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/3cokpao2odep},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/3cokpao2odep}
}

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