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Amount of Vocabulary Research | ||
Tags: Number of words | Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| crafedog Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5822 days ago 166 posts - 337 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean, Tok Pisin, French | Message 1 of 34 13 May 2011 at 9:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hello everyone.
A while ago I went to a teaching conference and one of the guest speakers was a man called Paul Nation. He's an English teacher but nowadays he's specialises in how much vocabulary one needs to know to understand written text. I forgot to put this on the site a while ago when I went to the conferences but I found the name again and a link to his research. I've seen this debate a few times on this site so I thought some of you might find it interesting. Now you probably have your own opinion on how much vocab is necessary etc but this guy (and others) have done quite a lot of research on it (on English at least. Your target language could be different) so it should be valuable information for language learners. I found this interesting because quite recently I've started seeing how many new words I could understand in texts. I estimate my own vocab to be around 8000 words, a bit under/over. I understand about 96% of most news articles but I only understand about 91% of an adult fantasy novel in Spanish that I just started (Game of Thrones). It is interesting to find out how much (%) you are understanding because it tends to be higher than you think/feel. As he noted though when I saw him, even with a huge vocabulary it's still more than possible to still miss out on words with a perceived high rate of frequency as you'll see in the research. Here's the link Edited by crafedog on 13 May 2011 at 9:04pm 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| translator2 Senior Member United States Joined 6923 days ago 848 posts - 1862 votes Speaks: English* | Message 2 of 34 13 May 2011 at 10:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for the post. Interesting especially since I just ordered his book Learning Vocabulary in Another Language:
LInk to Book 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| crafedog Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5822 days ago 166 posts - 337 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean, Tok Pisin, French | Message 3 of 34 14 May 2011 at 7:24am | IP Logged | ||
Cool. Post back here in a little while once you've given it a good read. It'd be really interesting to hear what you think of it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6707 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 34 14 May 2011 at 8:00am | IP Logged | ||
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I generally like that article. First, because it supports the notion that you need a big vocabulary to read normal texts without being stopped by unknown words all the time:
"With a vocabulary size of 2,000 words, a learner knows 80% of the words in a text which means that 1 word in every 5 (approximately 2 words in every line) are unknown. Research by Liu Na and Nation (1985) has shown that this ratio of unknown to known words is not sufficient to allow reasonably successful guessing of the meaning of the unknown words. At least 95% coverage is needed for that. Research by Laufer (1989) suggests that 95% coverage is sufficient to allow reasonable comprehension of a text. A larger vocabulary size is clearly better" Second, because the article points out that you may need other tactics to learn words outside the central core (some 1000 words): "Clearly the learner needs to know the 3,000 or so high frequency words of the language. [...] Nation (1990) argues that after these high frequency words are learned, the next focus for the teacher is on helping the learners develop strategies to comprehend and learn the low frequency words of the language. Because of the very poor coverage that low frequency words give, it is not worth spending class time on actually teaching these words. Third, because flashcards and other non-contextual methods are accepted - although I personally find structured worldlist methods more attractive than flashcards: "Learning from lists or word cards is only an initial stage of learning a particular word (see Schmitt and Schmitt, 1995 for further information). It is however a learning tool for use at any level of vocabulary proficiency. There will always be a need to have extra exposure to the words through reading, listening and speaking as well as extra formal study of the words, their collocates, associations, different meanings, grammar and so on." Exactly what I have been saying about wordists - they prepare you for more efficient use of genuine texts or speech. And finally because it is pointed out that learning from context is most efficient when you are good enough to plough through a lot of material: "The problem for beginning learners and readers is getting to the threshold where they can start to learn from context. Simply put, if one does not know enough of the words on a page and have comprehension of what is being read, one cannot easily learn from context. Liu Na and Nation (1985) have shown that we need a vocabulary of about 3000 words which provides coverage of at least 95% of a text before we can efficiently learn from context with unsimplified text." Edited by Iversen on 18 May 2011 at 9:44pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Matheus Senior Member Brazil Joined 5085 days ago 208 posts - 312 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: English, French | Message 5 of 34 16 May 2011 at 1:32am | IP Logged | ||
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Interesting article and book. Thanks for sharing.
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| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5434 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 6 of 34 16 May 2011 at 6:13am | IP Logged | ||
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I read the article and although I have some methodological differences over the definition of a word and the absence of a distinction between active and passive vocabulary, the key finding I note is the sweet spot of about 3,000 word families in English for good basic coverage of many written texts. (There seems to be no reference to spoken language). The amount of vocabulary needed beyond that depends of the nature of the texts to be read. Since a major focus of the article is English for academic purposes, i.e. upper-level high school and university, there is a need for attention to this kind of language.
In my opinion, this article sheds light on something that we've been discussing at various times here at HTLAL. My takeaway is that a figure of 2,000 to 3,000 active word families are a minimum that you need the use a language proficiently. I emphasize the word minimum. Then you have to build on that foundation according to your specific needs. This means that your passive vocabulary size will increase considerably with greater exposure to more diverse texts. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6054 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 7 of 34 16 May 2011 at 9:24am | IP Logged | ||
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2Research on learning from context shows that such learning does occur but that it requires learners to engage in large amounts of reading and listening because the learning is small and cumulative (Nagy, Herman and Anderson, 1985). This should not be seen as an argument that learning from context is not worthwhile. It is by far the most important vocabulary learning strategy and an essential part of any vocabulary learning program. For fast vocabulary expansion, however, it is not sufficient by itself. There is no research that shows that learning from context provides better results than learning from word cards (Nation, 1982).
I am surprised more people here that are against flash card and other rote learning methods aren't arguing about this finding. This article essentially implies that the fastest way acquire a native like vocab is to directly memorize the most common words that make up 95% of the language (possibly 8000 to 10000 words), as fast as you possibly can. When you have reached the absolute minimum threshold to understand a teen novel by context (should be around 2000 to 3000 words memorized or known), or any lower vocab but still native (i.e. not a child's book, or beginning reader's book), you should start reading those immediately but still continue with the flashcards. When you have reached the threshold to understand nearly any adult native material by context alone, you should then start reading those immediately and as much as possible, all the while choosing which subjects you will want to be most versed in. This is a total slam to the communicative method, which favors thematic and functional approaches from the beginning, squandering precious time and energy that students could be using to master the core about of words and read simple (yet native) material that will be useful no matter what they do with L2. This article implies that you shouldn't be doing anything like that until you've mastered the core group of words in all 4 skills. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6707 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 8 of 34 16 May 2011 at 10:02am | IP Logged | ||
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As I see it the central core of maybe 1000 words pop up everywhere, so you don't have to learn them from a list or flashcards ... rather from a grammar, because most of the irregular words and function words belong here, and they are deeply involved in establishing the syntactical structures in a language.
The next level are the words that occur frequently, but not so frequently that it is logical to wait for them. It is difficult to give an upper limit, and your needs may depend on the texts you want to read, but maybe around 3-5.000 words. Anything beyond that should be dictated by your own gut feeling: just look at a word and ask yourself whether this is a word you want tho know and maybe even use. Frequencie tables are basically meaningless at this level. And as stipulated in the article: learning words bulkwise is a preparation for later use, not an end in itself. The main thing that bothers me is (as you might expect) that flashcards are seen as the royal road to systematic vocabulary acquisition. In my view both flash cards, SRS programs and Huliganov's golden lists share one common trait, namely that they don't emphasze the initial moment where you decide to learn a word. My hunch is that it is worth spending some more time and effort at that moment, and that's what I try to do in my wordlist layout. On the other hand I don't specify more than one repetition round, where the other methods keep reminding you about each new word until you have proved that you have learnt it. Edited by Iversen on 16 May 2011 at 10:03am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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