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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 5211 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 257 of 319 26 April 2014 at 1:39pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
This is very true, and I have said so in the past. But the question is: how many words do you need to pass the IELTS Band 8 test or to write a book? Nation and Head found that students needed a mean of 1490 words to pass the test; they did not say that the students knew only these words. As a matter of fact, I don't think that there were any figures for the standard deviation, but we can assume that some students got by with even fewer words and some with more. Of course we can ask: how many words do the students actually know or are able to use? That's a very valid question, but that's what all the other studies have attempted to estimate. But it's irrelevant here because we are looking at what was actually used. To come back to our author analogy, we see something similar. I'm a great fan of P.G. Wodehouse. I have no idea of how many distinct words he has used in any given novel. Let's say 4000. He wrote 97 books. They are not all novels, of course, but for our purposes, we use them to calculate P.G. Wodehouse's vocabulary size. Fans of this author know that his novels are essentially the same. Could it be possible that all these novels use only 4500 words? It's possible and even likely. But this has nothing to do with how many words P. G. Wodehouse knew or could recognize. And I should also add that measuring P.G. Wodehouse's vocabulary would be an exercise in navel-gazing. Much of this questioning of vocabulary size is related to the question of how to prepare for these tests. Should you set up an Anki deck of 1500 words for the Band 8 test and drill these to death? No, but I would certainly concentrate on being truly fluent and accurate with that very high frequency core that will make up 50-75% of your speaking. This is what drives fluency. But the main point of all this is that you don't need 5000 or 10000 words to pass that test. Edited by s_allard on 26 April 2014 at 2:17pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5211 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 258 of 319 26 April 2014 at 1:55pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Iversen has said it quite well; I barely have to add anything. My original post was it bit garbled but the idea was that people, not only academics, can have knowledge of a large number of words in a target language and not be able to use them in simple fluent conversations. Actually, I'm sure this has happened to most of us here with our various languages. We can read books and newspapers without a problem. But when we meet a native speaker on a bus, can we chat away just like any other native speaker? Most likely not. I don't believe it has anything to do with social anxiety. The real problem is that we have often never really practiced true conversational interaction in our target language. That 5000-word vocabulary is of no great use if your pronunciation is so-so and you've never mastered all the little techniques and basic words that make up conversational interaction. Something as simple as talking about the weather and the high cost of living can be very challenging. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4302 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 259 of 319 26 April 2014 at 3:27pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
But this was only for the writing part, wasn't it? Good luck passing the listening part with a vocabulary of only 1500 words. It's hard enough to do with all words known... vaguely recognizing some more words might be sufficient for the reading part, but the listening part is more challenging when it comes to the automaticity of recognition and response time edit: It was the speaking part, not the writing part. It's funny how nobody in this discussion about these 1500 words seems to have read the linked article (me included), because the number is wrong. Band 8 speakers used 1491 tokens on average, which only tells us about the length of the utterance, not about the vocabulary used. The mean number of types (=unique tokens) was 408.1. I hope nobody here will claim that you can get a band 8 with an active vocabulary of only 408 lemmas. More interestingly, the total number of types used by all 15 test takers together was 2374. This number seems to be a bit more realistic for active speaking vocabulary, the demands in writing are usually higher in terms of vocabulary range. Also, the questions could be grouped into only 4 different topics, and naming them task 70, 78, 79 and 80 respectively would suggest that there are a lot more topics used in IELTS exams. edit2: It seems like the words weren't lemmatized, so the type count is actually higher than the number of lemmas, which makes the specific numbers even less suitable for a serious discussion. Edited by daegga on 26 April 2014 at 6:35pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6378 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 260 of 319 26 April 2014 at 3:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Yeah, some exam makers seem to think we have tape recorders in our heads. You don't know which details will be significant later on. Or which insignificant details you'll be asked about.
And while we're discussing mostly active vocabulary here, and passive vocabulary usually includes the words you *potentially* can understand... for the listening tasks you need a truly automatic command of the passive vocabulary, and the mere seconds of hesitation can be crucial when you're required not only to understand, but to answer questions/explain/etc. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5211 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 261 of 319 26 April 2014 at 10:32pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think this observation is correct. The interpretation of the figures is even more intriguing. Instead of 1490 different words, we have 408 types or different words. There figures are even more interesting. If you take all the different words or types for the 15 candidates, we get 2374, which is not a particularly high figure. Just exactly what does an average of 408 types or words mean? I'm at a loss here. Are the authors saying that the successful candidates used an average of 408 different words out of an average number of 1490 words. Did these candidates pass the exam with less than 500 different words, yes or no? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4302 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 262 of 319 26 April 2014 at 10:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yes they did. But one can't draw any conclusion from this. Let's look at the writing task. It's a 150 word description of a graph plus a 250 word essay, makes a total of 400 words. You can't possibly use more than 400 different words in this task if you only write a total of 400 words. The only way this number would suffice would be if you knew the task beforehand and could prepare your response. But you still don't know how many words you need to know in order to pass a random question, because the vocabulary requirement in such a short task is very topic specific. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5211 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 263 of 319 26 April 2014 at 11:10pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
We're not talking about the writing test. We're talking about the speaking test. If I recall correctly, it consists of a 15-minute interview. There is a limit to the number of words (tokens) what can say in that time. What the figures seem to say is that 408 different words are all you need to pass this test. Let's make the test 60 minutes. How many more different words would be used? Let's assume four times. That gives us 1632. It's still a low figure. Just what can we conclude from the fact that the successful candidates used only 408 different words or types in the oral proficiency test? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5211 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 264 of 319 26 April 2014 at 11:32pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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While we are trying to figure out the meaning of those vocabulary size figures, here is a something on the
problem of counting words and the problem of multiple meanings. I'm currently reading the 1909 novel, Mike At Wrykin, by P. G. Wodehouse. I'm about to give up because the story is so steeped in cricket lore and public -- or private for us North Americans - school culture that I find much of the story nearly incomprehensible. Here is something from the third page into the book. "Hooray! Mike's going to Wrykin. I bet he gets into the first eleven his first term." "Considering there are eight old colours left," said Bob loftily, "besides heaps of last year's seconds, it's hardly likely that a kid like Mike'll get a look in. He might get his third, if he sweats." I know vaguely that they are talking about cricket teams at Wrykin but beyond that I really don't understand what this is all about. None of the words are particularly new to me but are they really part of my vocabulary? Edited by s_allard on 26 April 2014 at 11:43pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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