|
 |
Proved: 8k are enough to cover %100! | ||
Tags: Number of words | English | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Hashimi Senior Member Oman Joined 6258 days ago 362 posts - 529 votes  Speaks: Arabic (Written)* Studies: English, Japanese | Message 1 of 14 04 November 2014 at 5:24pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
8000 words only are enough to provide %98 - %100 coverage of authentic texts. We know that the top 100 words in English, for example, account for approximately 50% of all written texts. But according to Dr. Paul Nation and other researchers, at least 40,000 words are needed to provide 98% coverage for most general texts in English. This is bad news for language learners, because various studies demonstrated that to effectively guess new words from context there has to be at least 95% coverage. Dr. Nation identifies this coverage level as the minimum required to read texts for meaning. He cites the 98% level as the absolute "minimum" for guessing in context. Does this mean that an English learner should know 40,000 words at least before he can read authentic texts and guess the meaning of unknown words from context? Even if he understand 98% of all words, this means that he will encounter THOUSANDS of unknown words in a typical book! ( 1 unknown word on every 2nd line of text, 16 unknown words per page). The good news is that practically, these calculations are wrong! In 2003, the Japan Association of College English Teacher (JACET), published "the JACET List of 8000 Basic Words" (thereafter JACET8000). The JACET 8000 is a radically new word list designed for all English learners in Japan. This list is based on two kinds of corpora: the British National Corpus and the JACET 8000 Subcorpus. One committee member of JACET developed a program "JACET8000 Level Marker" which analyzes the words in actual English texts, and indicates their word ranks. Using this program, three authentic texts, taken from newspapers and governmental documents, were examined. The words in the boldface are those not included in the JACET8000. The first example is shown below:
Here, according to a mechanical calculation, the text cover rate is 93%. However, among the six unregistered words, two are numerals and one is a proper noun. This suggests that the JACET8000 covers almost all of the words in the newspapers, except for three difficult words of "bereaved", "airstrip," and "clogged." The second example is taken from the Telegraph Newspaper and the Standard Aptitude Test (SAT), a commonest college admission test in the USA. The below is a part of the reading material in the "Critical Reading" section:
In this case, the cover rate of the JACET 8000 is as high as 98%. Although "littermate" is a difficult word whose meaning we can hardly guess by its morphological constituents, "kittenhood" would be easily understood as a variation of "kitten," which is ranked at the level 7. This shows that the JACET8000 covers almost all of the words in the SAT reading section. The third sample is taken from the US President's Addressee at the United Nations General Assembly in 2003:
A mechanical calculation shows that only 82% of the words are covered by the JACET8000. However, if we put aside the proper nouns and numerals as in the case of a newspaper article, all words in Text 3 are included in the JACET8000. Our analysis of three example passages proves that the JACET8000 effectively covers the vocabulary in not only easy reading materials but also authentic contemporary English texts. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5531 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 14 04 November 2014 at 5:45pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Um, yes, those calculatutions are indeed wrong. If you know 98% of the words on a page, that means you are unfamiliar with 2%. If we assume 350 words per page, then 2% of 350 words gives us 7 unknown words. Not 16. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Elexi Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5564 days ago 938 posts - 1840 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 3 of 14 04 November 2014 at 6:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
Where does Professor Nation say you need 40,000 words?
In the linked article , Nation says exactly what the OP stated - 'If we take 98% as the ideal coverage, a 8,000–9,000 word-family vocabulary is needed for dealing with written text, and 6,000–7,000 families for dealing with spoken text'. I am citing here from the Conclusion. http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/about/staff/publications/paul -nation/2006-How-large-a- vocab.pdf 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5598 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 4 of 14 04 November 2014 at 6:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
With the surge of assistance, the tiny ***** that serves this ancient backwater on the Silk Road was *****.
I think it is proved that I cannot understand this sentence. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4348 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 5 of 14 04 November 2014 at 6:05pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
Have you checked a paragraph or two from a novel?
@Cabaire, a single sentence might be more difficult to understand, than a whole paragraph or chapter, because you lack quite a lot of the context. Edited by Ezy Ryder on 04 November 2014 at 6:07pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Hashimi Senior Member Oman Joined 6258 days ago 362 posts - 529 votes Speaks: Arabic (Written)* Studies: English, Japanese | Message 6 of 14 04 November 2014 at 6:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Why do you assume 350 words per page?! I'm not talking about graded readers or Harry Potter-like fiction! There are 600 to 1000 words per page in most academic books. http://anycount.com/WordCountBlog/how-many-words-in-one-page / Even if there were 7 unknown words per page, this means 2100 unknown words in a 300 pages book. ***
That's right. I myself don't know the meaning of "bereaved" and "clogged", but I understant that paragraph clearly because of the context. 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 7 of 14 04 November 2014 at 6:55pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Also, 7 unknown words on an individual page won't necessarily amount to 700 words in a 100-page long book. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7204 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 8 of 14 04 November 2014 at 7:43pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I believe you. You bring up a point from Professor Arguelles talk on reading vocabulary. What he says is that with less than 98% text coverage, one gradually uses the thread of a story. He also said that with 91-97% coverage one may think they are getting most of the story, but they are only getting the gist and they may not realize their comprehension isn't quite as good as they imagine. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
