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Article: Students fall short on Vocabulary | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5427 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 73 of 319 10 April 2014 at 3:02pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I really don't disagree with Iversen. I would simplify it even more. Your vocabulary varies according to your needs. If
you want to read all Shakespeare, you need 29,000 words. If you don't want to read Shakespeare and instead want to pass that C1 speaking exam maybe 1800 will probably do the trick. I even think most of these figures are irrelevant. You just get the vocabulary you need. My only word of caution is against the belief that vocabulary alone is the problem. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4662 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 74 of 319 10 April 2014 at 3:06pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
That study shows that you can pass a C1 test using only unique 1800 words. That's not the same (by any stretch of the imagination) as (actively) knowing only unique 1800 words. It just means that when tested today you only needed to use a specific 1800 words. As with most tests, you don't get to know beforehand which 1800 you'll need on the day. That's the case with most tests. You're supposed to learn N things, we'll test as much as we can in (say) 3 hours and we'll try to design the questions so that you can't "study to the test". I happened to remember that I had some mail files lying around that represent a reasonable fraction of my home emails over the last few years or so plus a few years worth of emails from when I was with a previous employer. I knocked up a very rough script to plough through them and extract those that were written by me, to ignore binary attachments, to discard quoted text. The script is rather too aggressive and discards some emails that I did write and discards text that I wrote too (where, for example I no longer have my original email but do have the reply where someone quoted it). The script turns what's left into unique words and throws away any that are not in the dictionary file on this system. The result is 6881 unique words. If I had a way of screen scraping my HTLAL posts, I'd adapt the script and see what it thinks of that. A better corpus might be the sum total of my usenet postings, but I can't find any way to get google groups to give me that in any kind of electronic format. Close, but no cigar google! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5427 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 75 of 319 10 April 2014 at 6:47pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I totally agree. That is exactly why I wrote: "I said using not knowing." Now the question is how many words does one have to know how to use. Since you don't know what words might come up, then theoretically the number of possible words is very high. So how do we determine how many words we need to prepare. Is it the 5,000 most common words or 10,000 or 20,000? And how do you go about preparing? Do you make up 10,000 flashcards and spend your time going through them? I think that people are making things too difficult for themselves. First, we have to keep in mind that neither the IELTS or the CFER tests for vocabulary. There are no prescribed or even recommended numbers. It's the ability to use the language that is being tested. You will not be asked technical questions such as how does an internal combustion engine work. On the other hand you may be asked how do you think cars have changed society. In fact, the IELTS guidelines state explicitly that you will be asked about topics such as hobbies and daily activities. Look at the tasks mentioned in the Nation and Head study: Eating out, Reading a book, Language learning, Describing a person. What the examiner is looking for here is the ability of the candidate to speak about these topics at a certain level. Can you study for these topics and game the system? Can a Band 2 candidate not study a bunch of flashcards and outfox the examiner into believing that they are really a Band 8? Anyone who has done a bit of language testing will tell you that you cannot easily bamboozle a live examiner. It seems that the Band 8 candidates could perform satisfactorily with on the average less than 1500 words. Given that we know what kind of topics will appear and in what form, could we not assume that a person with a solid ability in only 1500 general words could handle any of these questions? I'm not saying that 1500 is a guarantee of success. What I'm saying is that the study pointed out that the Band 8 users, in addition to knowing more words than lower-level uses demonstrated more sophisticated abilities. Frankly, I don't think these candidates went into the examination deliberately limiting themselves to 1500 words but I don't believe there is any proof that you absolutely need any higher number. Edited by s_allard on 10 April 2014 at 6:51pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5427 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 76 of 319 10 April 2014 at 7:06pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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In my opinion, much of the debate we are having here stems from this mistaken belief that one needs a large
vocabulary to do anything. It would seem that if you know less than 1500 words, all you can do is grunt, snort and point in order to communicate. The great thing about the Nation and Head study is that is has proved plain as day that you can do a hell of a lot with 1500 words. Could you do more with 15,000 words? Certainly. Will that automatically make you a better speaker of the language? I'm not so sure. If it were all so simple, why not just have vocabulary tests on computers and do away with all the live examiners? I once argued here that you could start speaking French with just 300 words. The reaction was such that I thought I was going to be tarred and feathered and run off the forum. Well, not exactly, but I reaped many a bushel of incredulity and scorn. For some strange reason, many people thought that I had said that you shouldn't learn more than 300 words in French. The lesson I learned is that what you write is not always what people understand. Edited by s_allard on 10 April 2014 at 7:08pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6594 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 77 of 319 10 April 2014 at 7:20pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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IELTS is only a CEFR-compatible test though, not designed with the scale in mind. Most of the topics you mentioned are too easy for C1.
More importantly, do you honestly think one can fit the CEFR guidelines with such a vocabulary? Especially in a language with few cognates/borrowings. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5427 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 78 of 319 10 April 2014 at 8:44pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I wouldn't even bother thinking about vocabulary size. I think that when one is preparing for a test, you should
above all look at the guidelines, requirements and recommendations from the test makers. And there are lots of sample or past tests around. The interesting thing is that most of the time we know what the tests consist of. For example, the Spanish DELE C2 test require that you read and article, summarize before two examiners and engage in a debate over the article for 20 minutes. Instead of worrying about my vocabulary size, I would practice doing the above exercise with a tutor until I felt really comfortable. Of course I would use materials similar to what I expect to get on the test. I would certainly not try to learn vocabulary from 20 different technical areas just because I don't know what questions will come up. Instead I would try to read widely so as to get a kind of superficial general knowledge. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6594 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 79 of 319 10 April 2014 at 9:30pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yeah, unfortunately in terms of tests it's more efficient than actually reaching the level and learning the things you don't need in the test but only in real life. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
 DavidStyles Octoglot Pro Member United Kingdom Joined 3938 days ago 82 posts - 179 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, French, Portuguese, Norwegian Studies: Mandarin, Russian, Swedish, Danish, Serbian, Arabic (Egyptian) Personal Language Map | Message 80 of 319 10 April 2014 at 11:04pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Did you have a specific 300 words in mind? I'd be interested to see the list. I compiled a list of around 300 words (I sometimes modify it slightly - last count was 313 that I consider essential to being able to speak English. With these words one can express most things, albeit in a clumsy fashion. I've long used the list and its directly translated equivalents for the purpose of giving myself or my students a swift leg-up into a new language, learning these words before anything else. Nowadays, as part of a PhD study, I've taken the notion and applied it to a larger scale, and am creating a tiered corpus (so, tiered for what is needed for various "levels", with the CEFR levels being obvious examples of such) optimized for many languages (ie, so it doesn't have the shortcoming that my long-used English list does of being too anglocentric to the disfavour of other languages). Edited by DavidStyles on 10 April 2014 at 11:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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