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The task language should be appropriate to learner level and should not create barriers to specific groups of learners.","Answer",{"name":66,"@type":61,"acceptedAnswer":67},"Which factors influence word difficulty in assessment contexts?",{"text":68,"@type":64},"Word length, word frequency, vocabulary knowledge, and age of acquisition all affect comprehension and performance. Polysemy can also increase processing time by adding related meanings that may be ambiguous in context.",{"name":70,"@type":61,"acceptedAnswer":71},"What guidance does the review provide to improve accessibility of vocabulary?",{"text":72,"@type":64},"It recommends substituting infrequent words with more commonly used alternatives when possible, while preserving meaning. 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It highlights the key linguistic features that item writers should consider, including word difficulty, the use of command words, sentence complexity, and cohesion. The paper is one of a series of research reports contributing to AQA’s work on identifying and documenting new principles on question writing. The research evidence is intended to guide the design, production and implementation of future AQA assessments.  \nIntroduction  \nThe use of language in assessment items requires careful consideration as it can impact the fairness and validity of the assessment. Essentially, unless the construct being tested is language, tasks used to test students’ knowledge and skills must not contain linguistic features that prevent a student from demonstrating what they can do (Avenia-Tapper & Llosa, 2015) . In the UK, Condition G3 and the newly revised Condition D2 of Ofqual’s General Conditions of Recognition specify that the language used in a task should be appropriate for the level of the learner and the construct being tested and should not create any barriers to specific groups of learners (Ofqual, 2017 , 2022) .  \nLinguistic factors affecting accessibility and validity  \nWord difficulty  \nThe features that impact how difficult a word is for a learner to comprehend are multi-faceted (Hiebert et al. , 2019) . For decades, word length (e.g. the number of letters or syllables) has been viewed as a dominant driver for determining lexical complexity and, subsequently , word difficulty. Early work by Carver (1976) posited that word length determines passage demand, and this notion remains integral to readability formulas in current use (Lenzner, 2014; Culligan, 2015) . However, a number of other factors need to be considered when concluding how difficult a word might be for a candidate to read and comprehend in an assessment environment. Word frequency, which impactshow familiar a word is likely to be to a student, is another key influence and may be a more prominent driver of word difficulty than word length (Janan & Wray, 2012) .  \nThe relationship between reading proficiency and vocabulary knowledge has long been established and discussed (Davis, 1944; Anderson & Freebody, 1981; Baumann, 2014) . Work devising word frequency lists , through the analysis of a large corpus of text (Nation, 2008), offers insight into the vocabulary of students and the words they are likely to be familiar with. A word family is the vocabulary around a root word such as ‘give’ and its other forms such as ‘gives’,‘giving’ and ‘given’ (Beauchamp & Constantinou, 2020) . The 3 ,000 most common word families have been termed high-frequency words, and these are the words that learners need to be proficient with to comprehend everyday texts. To understand more difficult texts such as newspapers and books, students need to know the 8 ,000 most common word families (Nation 2013; Schmitt & Schmitt 2014) . Previous analysis of word frequency in A-level exam papers  \n(Beauchamp & Constantinou, 2020) suggests that, besides subject-specific or technical language (e.g. ‘photosynthesis’ in Biology) , the use of vocabulary from above the threshold of the 4 ,000 most frequent word families may cause accessibility barriers for some learners, most notably those with English as an additional language (EAL) .  \nTo avoid introducing language-related construct irrelevant variance 1 and consequently disadvantaging students who have a limited vocabulary , or those with EAL, Beauchamp and Constantinou recommend substituting infrequent words for more commonly found ones, wherever possible. For example, they suggest using ‘obstructed’ instead of ‘hindered’, or ‘unwillingness’ in place of ‘reluctance’. Selecting words from more frequently used word families makes the assessments more a","cbCaijapj8j1VlQv","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaijapj8j1VlQv","pdf",228046,"English","# Executive summary\n# Introduction\n# Linguistic factors affecting accessibility and validity\n## Word difficulty\n## Command words","[{\"question\":\"Why does the language used in assessment items affect fairness and validity?\",\"answer\":\"Because linguistic features can prevent students from demonstrating what they can do unless the construct being tested is language. The task language should be appropriate to learner level and should not create barriers to specific groups of learners.\"},{\"question\":\"Which factors influence word difficulty in assessment contexts?\",\"answer\":\"Word length, word frequency, vocabulary knowledge, and age of acquisition all affect comprehension and performance. Polysemy can also increase processing time by adding related meanings that may be ambiguous in context.\"},{\"question\":\"What guidance does the review provide to improve accessibility of vocabulary?\",\"answer\":\"It recommends substituting infrequent words with more commonly used alternatives when possible, while preserving meaning. It also suggests using software such as AntConc to compare synonyms against vocabulary frequency lists.\"}]","The use of language in assessment items - Executive summary | PDF",1792464912]