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Article: Students fall short on Vocabulary | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 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 57 of 319 09 April 2014 at 3:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
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As I said, I'm not questioning s_allard's experience. Of course most placement tests for classes are based on grammar. It's always presumed that if a learner lacks vocabulary, they can pick it up on their own. Because you don't meet most people who like learning grammar. But they exist.
And many of them are HTLAL members. In the world of language teaching you can hardly see a learner that has a perfect grammar but can barely speak/write. But language geeks and linguists can know a lot about the grammar of the languages they're not even learning. They may well read about grammar for fun, and they're quite likely to learn way more grammar than what they really need. I've been there too, I went through all Finnish textbooks I could find and then I would go to the library and look through scientific studies and find some structures that I still didn't know. Because the Finnish grammar is so delightful. It brought me a lot of joy but represented only a very small improvement in my knowledge. Not to mention that not everyone is impressed by the same things as you are, whether as a teacher or learner. Edited by Serpent on 09 April 2014 at 6:51pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Gemuse Senior Member Germany Joined 4081 days ago 818 posts - 1189 votes Speaks: English Studies: German | Message 58 of 319 09 April 2014 at 3:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
You are correct in that a good vocabulary does not imply a mastery of the language. However, is it true that in the real world, people have a mastery of the language without having a good vocab? Is a good vocab a side effect of mastery of the language obtained through lots of reading? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 59 of 319 09 April 2014 at 4:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
I frown on these receptive vocabulary tests because I think they are essentially meaningless. I took the test here and scored 37,400. Frankly, I do not know what that means. I do not know 37,400 words in English. I can vaguely recognize some of the more rare ones because of latinate cognates with French. I just don't see the relevance to my ability to use the language. I have never used most of these words and never will. What I did do, and I highly recommend this, is redo the test but indicating only all the words that I recall using in English in the past year. OK, I don't really remember all the words I spoke in the past year but I could exclude those that I had no occasion to use. I scored 4,200. Let's call this my historical productive vocabulary. I think this figure is an overestimation. I believe it's much closer to 3,000 - 3,500. But all of this is besides the point. Knowing more words is certainly better than knowing fewer. But I fail to see how checking off a list of about 120 totally decontextualized words can give me any real and actionable knowledge of how many words I have in my head and what to do with them. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 60 of 319 09 April 2014 at 4:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
I believe, like most people here, that good vocabulary goes hand in hand with mastery of the language. And there are lots of ways to acquire vocabulary. My argument is with this obsession about vocabulary size. I've always said that vocabulary takes care of itself. I don't mean that you don't have to study vocabulary. What I mean is that it comes with exposure to the language. Through reading, for example, when you look up words in the dictionary and make flash cards. Or listening to the radio or surfing the Net. You learn words in context; you see how they are used. If you need technical words, you get them. If you're preparing for any of the CEFR exams, you're certainly not going to limit yourself to studying lists of words. I would hope that you are emphasizing putting these words in meaningful sentences on paper or in speaking. I wouldn't worry about how many words I know. Just keep learning something every day. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 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 61 of 319 09 April 2014 at 5:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
Basically, please acknowledge your privilege. Edited by Serpent on 09 April 2014 at 5:25pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4664 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 62 of 319 09 April 2014 at 8:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
I redid the test. It seems to use the same, or very similar, vocabulary in each run. Firstly I redid it ticking known words, but making a note of the ones that I felt I knew but wasn't sure I had used. ("nostrum", "epigone", "pother", "clerisy", "pabulum", "williwaw"). That gave me 42,200. I can't recall the words that I have used this year (or even in the last 365 days) so I settled for ticking only the words that I was fairly sure that I've used at some point in my life (i.e. I've written them or I've spoken them). That brought me down to 37,500. But then (almost) all my emails and conversations are in English. My mother-in-law used to ask for help with crosswords. I participate in various web-fora (such as this one) where repartee is witty and sophisticated (more often than not). I work as a software engineer so I'm right next to a whole department for whom "captious" is a way of life (QA). So I live almost my whole life in English. I don't think it unlikely that I've worked my way through 30,000+ different words. However, this test is supposed to measure passive knowledge (presumably using the sampling techniques @emk alluded to). Using the test to measure something entirely different (active knowledge) without further research isn't necessarily going to lead to useful results. The word list was probably derived by sifting through magazines, newspapers, novels and so on to build up frequency list: basically an indication of how likely you might be to come across a given word if you are reasonably well read. So if you know 90% of a suitable sample of the words in the 1000-5000 positions and 20% of the ones in the 10,000-15,000 range and so on it should be possible to form an accurate estimate of the number of words which you would recognise if you had the time (and the stomach) to sit through hour upon gruelling hour of tedious testing. That frequency list of words probably applies broadly to anyone reading a newspaper, watching the TV, reading the web and so on. Now the frequency list of words you might use in daily language may well differ markedly from those that your neighbour might choose to employ. I know how to use refulgent and vitiate but I don't recall ever using either. These are, I would suggest, words that are relatively infrequently used. I have seen both (recently) in emails at work, so someone there likes them. So I'm not sure that your test is entirely fair. Partly because you are using a (presumably) carefully designed list out of context. Partly also because I think that you may be underestimating your active vocabulary, if by active we mean "words you are capable of using correctly and are likely to recall in those situations where they are appropriate". If you don't produce English on a regular basis you may well only have used a few thousand unique words this year, but that's doing a disservice to the words you could have used had the occasion arisen. I can't recall when I last used proprietario or inquilino or mettere in vigore in Italian but today the opportunity arose and out they came. I would have considered them active yesterday, but I suspect (from what you write in earlier posts) that you might not. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 63 of 319 09 April 2014 at 10:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks to Dampingwire for some interesting insights. It's interesting to note that Iversen arrived at around 2500
different words used in a sample of his posts here. I estimate that I used around 3000 different words in the last year. These are relatively closed universes here. I'm sure that if Iversen and I were to look at all the different words used over our lifetimes, the figures would be quite different. If I refer to Iversen's output, what I find significant and amusing is that sophistication and quality of posts are not dependent on a large vocabulary. I suspect that there is a sweet spot around 2000 words that is probably a minimum that one needs to write well for HTLAL. Something else that must be pointed out here my productive vocabulary and Iversen's will overlap a lot but not completely. So anyone reading our blogs needs a receptive vocabulary that combines the distinctive items in both of our vocabularies. Again, I don't see the significance of all this. I like to believe that the crux of the matter is how well one uses words rather than the sheer number. One of my favourite statistics - and emk will remember this - is that Dr Seuss (Theodore Geisel) wrote "Green Eggs And Ham" using only 50 unique words. One of Geisel's most famous works "Cat In A Hat" contains 236 unique words. Edited by s_allard on 10 April 2014 at 2:21am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 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 64 of 319 09 April 2014 at 11:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
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And anyone reading this forum needs more than 5000 words to combine all the different vocabularies. Of course the same is true about reading a wide range of non-fiction or fiction.
BTW, some actual numbers from Erik Gunnemark: 3000-4000 are enough for reading newspapers or specialized literature in your area 8000 words are what an average European uses in daily life (in L1). That's enough for reading all kinds of (modern) literature 10-20k are the active vocabulary of a native speaker 50-100k are the passive vocabulary of a native speaker So depending on how much you read, the difference between the words you could use and do use in your native language can be 2000-12000. Note that Gunnemark focused on European languages. Forum members have repeatedly pointed out that reading an ordinary newspaper is far less trivial in Japanese or Korean than in a European language. I've seen the number 10000 and I see no reason not to trust it. They're learning the language, they know better. See also: kujichagulia's progress in Japanese and Portuguese. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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