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Article: Students fall short on Vocabulary | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4308 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes  Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 249 of 319 25 April 2014 at 9:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
Your estimates seem to be even a bit too conservative (imho your total words count for C2 should be in the C1 column instead). Here is a quote from an article I linked previously in this thread:
http://www.readingmatrix.com/articles/sept_2009/eldridge_neu feld.pdf page 226 So if they know more than 1650 words out of 2000, they actually know more than 6000 words out of 10000 having an IELTS score of 5.5 (low B2). But I don't know how they define a "word", and how you do (I assume Nation's word families are used). Edited by daegga on 25 April 2014 at 9:41pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5217 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 250 of 319 26 April 2014 at 12:04am | IP Logged | |||||
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I admire those members here who have gone to great lengths to examine the math behind these figures about
vocabulary size. I'm still thinking about all of this, but I have to say that I'm not inclined to do the math because, as is known, I question the relevance of the whole effort. That said, I think that there are issues worth exploring conceptually. For example, the classic distinction is between knowing passively and knowing actively. The former is generally the ability to recognize or know a definition of the word, and the latter is to know how to use the word. Of course, there is also the huge question of what exactly is a word. This where my beef with the whole principle of word counting lies. But let's put that aside for the time being. I have suggested that there is in reality another level of vocabulary knowledge that I termed working or real vocabulary. This describes that set of words, however these are defined, that one uses on a regular basis or in a given situation, such as in a speaking test. My reasoning is as follows. All of these vocabulary sizes are estimates based on the principle of high coverage of a wide range of sample texts according to genre (fiction, non-fiction, conversations, etc.). Any one sample text may use only a small subset of all the words but as the number of texts increases the range of words also increases. On the other hand, when we count the number of words that people actually use, the numbers are quite small. I come back to the Nation and Head study of the IELTS speaking test that found that successful Band 8 candidates used an average of only 1490 words. We are not talking about estimated passive or active vocabulary here. We are talking about what they used. To my perhaps naive mind this figure means that you only need to be able to use around 1500 words to pass the Band 8 test. Which 1500 words? Voilà la question. It's certainly not as simple as learning the first 1500 words in a frequency dictionary. That I think might be risky. I would go more for mastering the core high-frequency words that include the most important grammatical words and then working on vocabulary of general interest. I fully acknowledge that one's so-called active and passive vocabularies are probably much higher. What I'm looking at is going into an oral proficiency test situation with the experience of regularly and skillfully using 1500 words. I believe that such a candidate could easily handle a Band 8 level test, something akin to the C1 level. The typical objection is that suppose you are asked about a subject that you have never seen or heard of before. You will be doomed with only 1500 words. This is where the fallacy lies. First of all, you can recognize, decode and guess more than only 1500 words. That's that nebulous zone of passive and active vocabulary. Secondly, keeping in mind that these are not tests of content but ability to manipulate the language, the real issue is how skillfully one can use one's working vocabulary. We know that what the examiners are looking for is the ability to communicate with fluency, precision and complexity in speaking. Why can't this be accomplished with 1500 words? Isn't that exactly what Nation and Head have proved? Edited by s_allard on 26 April 2014 at 1:35am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4136 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 251 of 319 26 April 2014 at 1:56am | IP Logged | |||||
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Doesn't an average mean that the number of words was used only in an average single
exam? How do you know what's the common part? And what's the total vocabulary used? An example I could think of: I recently used a text analysis software to generate a lemma frequency dictionary based on a book in Japanese. The result surprised me, mere ~3,000 lemmas (not word families, lemmas) throughout ~200 pages. However, running the software on the whole series at once (8 books in total, all similar in length), the number of lemmas used rose to ~13,000. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5217 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 252 of 319 26 April 2014 at 3:44am | IP Logged | |||||
This is a the very issue here. Any one book uses 3000 "words" but the 8 books use an aggregate of 13000. How many words do you need to read a book? 3000. How many do you need to read the 8 books? 13000. All of this is very true. But let's say that you are writing a book. How many words do you use? Not 13000; it's more like 3000. The same with our IELTS candidates. If my understanding is correct, whilst the average individual vocabulary size is 1490. the sum total of different words of all the successful candidates is undoubtedly higher. But that's not of concern here. The candidates are using only 1500 words each just like our author who only needs 3000 to write that book. Here is twist on this. Suppose our same author writes 10 books. We can safely assume that the total vocabulary size is greater than 3000 words. But considering that the author has a certain style, there is probably a large common vocabulary. Now, we look at 10 books of similar genre by 10 different authors, we would probably see a larger vocabulary. Edited by s_allard on 26 April 2014 at 6:02am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5217 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 253 of 319 26 April 2014 at 6:43am | IP Logged | |||||
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To look at this issue from the opposite perspective, could you have a great vocabulary and not be able to carry on a
basic conversation with a native speaker? This is not as farfetched as it sounds. I see many examples of academics who can read and even write relatively good French but are unable on a basic level in French. The truth of course is that speaking the language requires a set of skills that are frankly quite different from reading and writing. I don't want to go into this subject right now but I think everybody gets the point. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6992 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 254 of 319 26 April 2014 at 9:27am | IP Logged | |||||
That academic, if a native speaker, may just have a social anxiety disorder. If they are a foreign language learner may also have a social anxiety disorder, or have simply never practiced speaking, or both. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6992 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 255 of 319 26 April 2014 at 9:34am | IP Logged | |||||
A single book or the words used in a single oral proficiency exam use only a subset of that individual's word stock. Just because they only used 1490 words or 3000 lemmas in a particular performance doesn't mean they exhausted their ability to use words. The nature of speech and writing in communication is that le mot just is not a small, restricted subset in the universe of words. Edited by luke on 26 April 2014 at 10:08am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6490 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 256 of 319 26 April 2014 at 10:03am | IP Logged | |||||
That's certainly possible. Last time I visited Russia (as far back as 2008) I could only speak at the 'prepared phrases' level, and I haven't said more than a couple of sentences since then, several years later. Besides I rarely hear spoken Russian because I haven't got a Russian TV channel, but I can read and write and to some extent even think in Russian. If I knew I had to speak Russian in a couple of months time I would definitely do serious something about it, but unless I buy a trip to Russia that is not likely to happen. So right now my spoken Russian sucks to a degree where I would be hesitant on speaking it in public. Nevertheless my word counts from 2009 and 2013 hovered around 10.000 words (the number 14.400 from 2009 is probably wrong - I based it on a published number of words for the dictionary, but my own estimate from 2013 is much lower). I have worked on several Slavic languages here in 2014 so my results would probably be higher now, and some of my work with Southern Slavic languages due to the conference in Novi Sad and my new TV channels in Polish and Croatian may also spill over to Russian, but right now my Russian is still mainly a written language in the same category as Latin. Edited by Iversen on 26 April 2014 at 10:48am 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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