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Article: Students fall short on Vocabulary | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4533 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes  Studies: German | Message 121 of 319 14 April 2014 at 9:47am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I guess we are talking about different things. Milton is using a test to measure how many word groups people have when they pass one of the CEFR levels, Nation's paper is looking at how many word groups are needed to understand a written or spoken corpus. The XLex test is problematic for C2 as its 5000 word limit appears to cause ceiling effects, and so underestimate the total number of words people who pass the C2 test possess. But putting that aside, even if people can pass a C2 with 5000 word groups*, Nation's overall estimate that you need 8000-9000 word groups for 98% understanding of written English, and 5000-6000 word groups for spoken English stands. So it might be possible to pass a C2 test with less words, but you aren't really going to be able to be comfortable until you approach the 8000-9000 mark, which is how I would normally think of C2. This is still a long way from educated native speakers who are estimated to have much higher vocabularies in the 150000-20000 word groups. ------- *My understanding is the XLex Lemma used in Milton's paper is smaller than Nation's definition of a word group. Edited by patrickwilken on 14 April 2014 at 9:49am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Gemuse Senior Member Germany Joined 4082 days ago 818 posts - 1189 votes Speaks: English Studies: German | Message 122 of 319 14 April 2014 at 12:05pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Native college freshmen have about a 17.5K word family English vocabulary. Read it in a couple of papers on vocabulary. Edited by Gemuse on 14 April 2014 at 12:07pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5430 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 123 of 319 14 April 2014 at 3:42pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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The heart of the problem seems to be the question of text coverage and comprehension. We see figures like 98%
text coverage is the minimum for good comprehension whereas 80% is just not enough because two words out of 10 would be incomprehensible. There are two issues here. We should always keep in mind the numbers of word quoted per given level of text coverage are calculated on the range of texts and not on a given text, So if you want to read a very wide range of literature you need X number of aggregate words. But if you are reading a particular text, you only need a limited range,. The other thing is is this issue of coverage and comprehension. If I return to Nation's study of the words of the film Shrek, he estimates that you need a 6000 vocabulary to understand films like Shrek. Is this really true? It is if you take just the script and apply the typical vocabulary counting methodology. But keep in mind you don't read the script on the screen. The words actually supplement the images. How important are the words relative to the images? Shrek is aimed at an audience of all ages. We can assume that adults get more out of the film because they understand more of the words. Some of the content is way over the heads of young children. But is this important? What I'm suggesting is that for certain types of texts, the amount of coverage is not that important because images and sound supplement comprehension. On the other hand, technical texts, and especially legal texts, demand very high coverage. For this like literature, maybe the amount of coverage is not as important. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5430 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 124 of 319 14 April 2014 at 5:26pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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The more I follow this debate, the more I think this whole thing about vocabulary size measurement is way
overblown. Outside some educational uses, I don't see the purpose of measuring vocabulary. If you are preparing for a test, do you continuously monitor your vocabulary size? If you want to do C2 in French, you must make sure that your receptive vocabulary is 15,000 before you even sign up for the test? Hell no. You work on all the important things that we know all about. I look at this from the viewpoint of an examiner.Suppose I'm giving an assessment type tests like the IELTS and I have three candidates, a beginner, an intermediate and an advanced candidate. I ask a typical question: What did you do last weekend? I want to look at the use of past tenses and the ability to narrate habitual past events. What do I see in the beginner? The examiner has to avoid complex questions. Lack of fluency, lots of mistakes of all types, stumbling, limited grammatical constructions and inability to indicate details and nuances. With the intermediate, all these indicators improve. Now let's look at the advanced candidate. What is striking? Good fluency with the ability to make longer phrases with good use of connector words. Little or no stuttering. Very few mistakes and the ability to self-correct mistakes. Complex grammar forms. Great use of logical connectors like prepositions and conjunctions. Lots of idioms and collocations. And finally, the ability to interact in a manner that approaches native-like. The examiner can ask any kind of questions using complex constructions. What is the role of vocabulary in all this? It's important of course. The advanced candidate has more vocabulary than the others, of course. But is the examiner looking for technical or rare words? Is the examiner counting words? The examiner is looking for appropriate use of words and not rarity. That's exactly why there are no prescribed vocabulary sizes for any of these tests. We read here all kinds of numbers that one should have to take the tests. But when you see what the test takers have really used, the numbers are tiny. I remind people that the average vocabulary size used by Band 8 candidates in the IELTS was less than 1500. In Milton's study of receptive vocabulary for the CFER the numbers also seem low. There is this idea that you may only use 1500 to pass the exam but you have to know 10000 or 20000 just in case because you never know what you will be asked. I question this. None of the tests are highly technical. You are being tested on your ability to manipulate the language. A good speaker can work around all kinds of things because that is the nature of being a good speaker. I maintain that a relatively small working vocabulary well used will do wonders. I wouldn't worry about vocabulary size at all because, as I have always said, it will take care of itself with more exposure to the language. Edited by s_allard on 14 April 2014 at 6:29pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6597 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 125 of 319 14 April 2014 at 5:56pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
The thing is that most of us view this as cheating through an exam. If the C1/C2 tests can be passed with a small vocabulary and a lot of guessing, that's a flaw of the test, not a benefit of knowing a small amount of vocabulary well. Let me ask you explicitly: do your recs and guidelines still stand if someone is more interested in reaching the level than passing the test? You said you'd read some logs, btw. Seen any Korean learners reading newspapers easily after a few months of picking up words from exposure? I'm not trying to discourage you from participating, but please respect the fact that not everyone here is learning Spanish/French/English in North America. And that this forum is focused on independent learning. Many people do take classes but for most of them it's just one more tool. If we're interested in impressing anyone, it tends to be native speakers or fellow learners, not teachers. Edited by Serpent on 14 April 2014 at 6:10pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4665 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 126 of 319 14 April 2014 at 8:11pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Yes, but as others have said, how many other words did they have available that just didn't happen to be needed? Every significant exam I've taken in my life has only tested a fraction of the syllabus (for obvious reasons). I certainly accept that one can pass a C2 test even though only 1500 unique word families have been produced during the test, but that's hardly the point. Surely the point is that the candidate who is able to do this has a great deal more wood available behind that arrow. I don't think you could find a candidate who could pass a C2 who only had ~1500 word families available to use: they'd have to be incredibly lucky that everything that came up happened to be in the area where their mastery of vocabulary was sufficient. I'd probably have no trouble constructing a little "language island" of that size in French on, say, deforestation in the Amazon plus general pleasantaries, and drilling sufficiently to be able to hold it all together in a reasonably scripted conversation. That, however, is clearly not what is going to happen in the test. So, in the same way as my university finals only tested a fraction of what I should have learned, a C2 test is probably going to test only a fraction of what one would expect a "fluent" speaker to be able to produce.
I've just checked the DELF C2 prices in Switzerland: C1 is 410CHF and C2 is 430CHF. That's about £300 (~$500US and ~$540CDN). Now before I go and throw that kind of money around I want some idea that I've prepared sufficiently. If I have an experienced tutor, then that's clearly where I'd go for advice. If there are past papers (I've no idea for these exams) then I'd try to get hold of some and try them (and have a native speaker pass an opinion if possible). What else can I do, well I can take a rough measure of my vocabulary size: if it's only a few thousand words, I'm clearly going to struggle (but I'd have to be fairly foolish to even think of myself as fluent at that point, surely). If it's 20,000+ words then I've done a lot of reading: if I have problems then they are probably going to lie elsewhere. If, as a result, I think my vocabulary is wanting, then I need to address this by absorbing more native material: books, films, skype, whatever. Once I'm passed the B1 level then I'm not going to blindly cram words using SRS (although I will probably use SRS to help me to remember words that I have picked up from my activities with native media.
I think this is where we differ. I maintain that you won't find a fluent user of 1500 words who does not have a reasonable multiple of that available. So if you happen to chat away for 30 minutes with this candidate with no difficulty then surely you didn't happen to stumble onto their one specialist subject? (I'm excluding, for example, that you are both car mechanics and happen to confine your conversation to that specific area). So surely their 1500 words of active vocabulary could have been replicated in a number of other areas and must be 3,000 words or more ... In which case their passive vocabulary must be that much larger?
I agree that good use of relatively small vocabulary will be very useful and very impressive. I just don't think that the normal learning style is likely to produce that without also producing a larger active vocabulary and a considerably larger passive vocabulary. I can't believe that most people learn their vocabulary via SRS. Even if they do, why stop at 1500 words? Surely most people pick up vocabulary as a side effect (and probably an intended one) of extensive reading. How, under those circumstances could you possibly control how many words you will have available? For those of use who learn this way, surely by the time we are ready to take a C1 exam we'll have absorbed a much larger number of words passively. My assertion is that the passive vocabulary is easier to measure than active. For the former, you can present a carefully constructed sample of words and non-words and measure the response. Trying to measure the latter surely involves a human examiner somewhere and so is going to cost much more. I would also be surprised that if one were to measure the passive vocabulary of those candidates that took those C1 tests, then it would be in the region of 7,000+ words and probably higher. So if that's right (and I'm only guessing) then measuring my passive vocabulary would give me an indication of whether I'm in the right sort of area to consider sitting a C1 exam. I'd have plenty more to do and I certainly don't think I grab a bunch of French e-books, throw them into an SRS and expect to pass the exam as a result of that. But I do think that I could save myself £300 when I'm certainly not ready. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4665 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 127 of 319 14 April 2014 at 8:22pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
If the test can be "gamed" then that's certainly a flaw, but I wouldn't see exploiting that weakness as "cheating". It's an efficient use of resources and no engineer could possibly argue against that. If I'm need a C2 certification to be even considered for a job, then I'll take every short-cut available to me. I'd be in excellent company too. Naturally, if I don't think I'm going to meet some other qualification for the job (for example, being able to manage the daily communication required or not being able to cope with some technical aspect of the job) then I'm wasting my money even trying. If I want a C2 certification as some sort of independent measure that I've reached a certain level, then I'm doing myself a disservice by "studying to the test". For the record, I think managing to get through the work required to pass a C2 test without incidentally also picking up a great deal of vocabulary would surely require much more effort than simply lost of reading. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4668 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 128 of 319 14 April 2014 at 10:39pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
source: http://testyourvocab.com/blog/ '' Most native English adult speakers who have taken the test fall in the range 20,000–35,000 words. Click here for a full breakdown by age (opens in new tab/window). And, as for foreign learners of English, we've found that the most common vocabulary size is from 2,500–9,000 words'' Edited by Medulin on 14 April 2014 at 10:45pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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