The Word He Knew but Didn't Use
A B1 writing task asks for a short email to a landlord about a broken heater. A candidate, Aisha, writes clearly and accurately but uses only basic lexis: 'bad', 'very cold', 'fix', 'fast', 'problem'. Her grammar is solid B1. In a separate vocabulary test she correctly defines 'freezing', 'repair', 'urgently', and 'fault', and she uses them appropriately in isolated sentences. Her teacher notes she has never used any of these four words in a piece of free writing across six tasks.
1. Aisha 'knows' the words on a test but does not use them in writing. Name the phenomenon and explain why a definition test did not predict her writing.
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This is the receptive–productive gap: recognition and definition are receptive skills; deploying a word under communicative pressure is productive and requires retrieval, not just recognition. A definition test supplies the word and asks for meaning, so it never tests whether Aisha can retrieve the word when the meaning comes first (which is what writing demands).
It is also an avoidance/automaticity issue: her basic words are fast and reliable, so under time pressure she defaults to them. The richer words exist in her store but have low activation strength - they lose the race to 'bad' and 'fix'. The definition test gave her the target word as a prompt, which removes exactly the retrieval step she fails at in free writing.
2. Propose one task-level change and one feedback change that would push these words into her active range, and say how you would measure whether it worked.
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Task-level change: constrain the task so the basic words are unavailable. For the landlord email, require at least three of a short target set (freezing, repair, urgently, fault) and ban 'bad', 'very cold', 'fix', 'fast'. Constraints force retrieval rather than allowing avoidance. Keep the communicative purpose intact so it does not become a gap-fill.
Feedback change: instead of underlining errors, mark upgrade opportunities - circle each basic word and write the target word she already knows in the margin, asking her to rewrite that sentence. This trains meaning-to-word retrieval, the direction writing actually requires.
Measurement: count target-word use in unconstrained free writing after four weeks. Success = at least two of the four appear spontaneously in a task where they were not required, used correctly. That distinguishes genuine activation from compliance with the constraint.