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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 5228 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 89 of 319 11 April 2014 at 2:15pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks @shapd for another excellent article by Nation on, inter alia, the film Shrek. I have no problems with the
findings that are consistent with all his other studies. Let me just clarify a detail of methodology that is often the source of some misunderstanding. When Nation says that the number of word families required to understand the film Shrek is 6000, he does not mean that Shrek uses that number of word families. In fact, only 479 word families are used. However these word families are spread over a range of what Nation calls frequency bands, 1000-word bands of words sorted by frequency. Shrek contains words ranging up to the sixth 1000-word band. Similarly, a literary work like D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover uses only 898 word families but these range up to the the 9000 word level. In other words, you don't need 9000 words to enjoy this particular novel but since you do not know in advance what words a novel will contain, to understand a number of novels of this type, you would need a vocabulary in the 9 k range. This is consistent with the other finding discussed earlier where I pointed out that candidates could pass the Band 8 IELTS oral proficiency with only 1479.0 word families. That's what they actually used. Those words range over a wide band, which is something Nation pointed out. Thus a candidate may use only on 1479 words but spread over a 7000 word family range. One could conclude that this candidate has a productive vocabulary of 7 k words. There are lots of other debatable theoretical and methodological issues that Nation raises, For example, does a six-year old child really need a 6000-word vocabulary to enjoy watching Shrek? But that's a different debate. Edited by s_allard on 11 April 2014 at 4:16pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5060 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 90 of 319 11 April 2014 at 2:25pm | IP Logged |
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In my almost four years on HTLAL, occasionally someone has announced their intention to learn a language using Swaedesh lists, or a frequency dictionary, combined with SRS. Sometimes it's a little more subtle but morphs into obsession. A learner may start out with good intentions and become obsessed (to the point of working for Anki instead of letting Anki work for the learner) with Anki/SRS because of the satisfaction of being able to measure progress by seeing the number of words "learned". I have yet to see one of these people succeed continuing in this fashion.
Where I think these folks go wrong is that their focus is too much on the vocabulary and they tend to minimize what to do with the words so that they will have meaning- grammar. The thought process seems to be (to me)- "if I learn 5,000 words then I'll be at B-1 and can move on to native materials/speaking". Then they start counting the words, almost to the point of obsession. Concentration on "word counting" can dominate the learning process to such a point that it may lead to the exclusion of learning how to manipulate the words learned effectively. As with most aspects of language-learning (and life) there's a happy medium that can be reached. In order to become one with a language, one should be able to read, write, speak and listen well, or at least read, speak and listen well. Though leaving out writing will have consequences, especially if one wants to pass one of these CEFR type tests. Each aspect of language tends to inform the other. Generally, from my experience here on the forum, those who tend to succeed in taking their language to a high level have a healthy balance among the aspects of language use. Discussion on HTLAL has moved more towards the logs and away from the general forum. We seem to have lost a lot of the intellectual discussion about languages and moved more towards watching learning take place in real time via the logs. Many members lament this change but to me it is useful to see what has been discussed intellectually play out in real time. At one end of the scale, a few years back, there was a log of a member who was using Swaedesh lists to learn nine languages. This member's process was extreme and seemed to rely almost exclusively on frequency vocabulary. The member hasn't visited the forum in almost two years. I bring this up because there is value in logs of those who are successful in achieving their goals and also in logs of those who do not succeed. It is important to see what works and equally important to see what doesn't work. There is a danger for beginners who state that they wish to learn a language who concentrate primarily on vocabulary acquisition and "word-counting". Counting words is measurable and quantifiable. Quantifying how well one uses words to express one's thoughts isn't so easy. To my way of thinking, vocabulary is important but only in balance with the other aspects of language. If I were to buy a truckload of lumber, bricks, tiles, concrete and plywood, I would have most of what I need to build a house. Without nails, mortar, grout, plumbing, wiring, insulation and windows, all I will have is a pile of materials. If my supply of raw materials is limited but I do have the means to assemble the pile, I will have a house but the house will be less elaborate than one I could have if I had a greater supply and quality of raw materials. That's for each builder to decide. Edited by iguanamon on 11 April 2014 at 7:21pm 9 persons have voted this message useful | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5228 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 91 of 319 11 April 2014 at 2:52pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks @iguamon for saying it better than I ever could. I will have a look at the learning logs.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5228 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 92 of 319 11 April 2014 at 4:51pm | IP Logged |
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There's another aspect of this vocabulary size debate that will be of particular interest to people who are
preparing for oral proficiency tests. As we have seen repeatedly, speakers generally use a very small number of words from the pool of words they presumably know. We see for example that someone could perform at the C1 level using around 1500 words. I would argue for even less. Not unexpectedly, the key issue here is how the words are used rather than the number. We know that in any language a very small number of words are very frequent. One of the reasons for their high frequency is multiple uses or meanings. Verbs are particularly notorious for this, and English phrasal verbs are prime examples in this department. What this means is that you can possibly get more bang for your buck, so to speak, by squeezing more meaning out of things you already know than trying to learn things completely different. Not to say of course that learning new words is bad. I say all this because I am always astounded by how simple words in a language can be used in so many different ways. For example, I am continuously seeing different ways of using very common verbs in Spanish like hacer, haber, tener, llevar. And since these verbs are already part of my working vocabulary, I can enhance my oral proficiency quite easily by tinkering with what I already know. And I can concentrate on fluency and not so much on grammar and pronunciation. I think this is ultimately what great language learners do, especially polyglots. I don't believe that the well- known Internet polyglots walk around with 10,000-word working vocabularies for each language. What they do is totally master the core vocabulary, the core grammar and add great pronunciation. And when they switch seemingly effortlessly between languages, we are in total awe. Edited by s_allard on 11 April 2014 at 5:25pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Lykeio Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4042 days ago 120 posts - 357 votes | Message 93 of 319 11 April 2014 at 5:08pm | IP Logged |
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I recently came across a frequency list of Latin words, it apparently gave 22,000
(though in actual fact something like 21,321/322 so grr). I was curious as to how much I would know, even at the final pages I wasn't find a word I didn't know. Truly I did not go through it all. I did find however that a lot of words you'd need for a common text like Virgil...just weren't there. Likewise there were words which could only have been present due to being over-represented in certain texts which formed part of the corpus. I'm actually going to go through Iversen's old posts and try to find his way of assessing my vocab in other languages. Frequency lists are VERY helpful to a certain point but beyond that they're a crutch. For Latin I think it has been estimated that something like 2000 words gives you 90& of a given text which isn't *quite* enough to read fluently but damn close. The other 10% will be made up of genre and author specific vocab and just those little words you can't always anticipate. As a student I used to supplement said 2-3000 words with author/genre/book specific frequency sheets and then just jump in. Beyond that they're a crutch, and not a very stable. Also the most important fact: When it comes to understanding, there is no binary opposition between total understanding and bewilderment. You can infer from context, make intelligent guesses etc. The real trick is just to press on. I think the ability to infer is itself an important skill in language learning. You're never going to be fully prepared! You may be able to read Molière but wait and see what happens when you need a specific type of bread from a Parisian bakery! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6395 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 94 of 319 11 April 2014 at 6:56pm | IP Logged |
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And the same is true about knowing words. There's a huge continuum between not being to remember a word at all and being able to recall it at once if somebody wakes you up in the middle of the night.
There's also the separate range of etymologically related words, including "unknown knowns". This especially matters in closely related languages of course. English speakers can guess a lot of words in a Romance language, but they need to see them used in authentic materials in order to truly learn them. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7003 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 95 of 319 11 April 2014 at 9:30pm | IP Logged |
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The amount of vocabulary acquired in part depends upon the goals and temperament or "learning style" of
the student. Is the student just seeking a CEFR level as a credential? Is the CEFR level a milestone in the path to a larger goal? Is CEFR level unimportant to the student because they have other language related goals? If the student focuses on listening and reading and doesn't pay much attention to spelling, how is CEFR level impacted? On temperament, does the concrete/sequential type of student do better initially in CEFR type exams? Is their progress more steady? Does a global/intuitive learner struggle more on initial tests, but later excel on intermediate ones? Does getting to the upper levels require the student to switch tracks? E.G. does the concrete/sequential learner have to eventually spend a good bit of time with extensive reading, listening, speaking? Does the global/intuitive have to go back and learn some of the basics although they can read books that challenge the concrete/sequential learner? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4707 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 96 of 319 12 April 2014 at 1:59am | IP Logged |
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I've mentioned this before, but I think one of the reasons vocabulary counts were removed from the descriptions of CEFR levels was to prevent people from using vocabulary counts as evidence for a level. For example, someone could take an online vocab test, and give the printscreen to an employer as evidence of having, for example, C1 in French. An ignorant HR manager (I almost want to add, is there any other kind?) would accept this as fact because they certainly wouldn't want to test the candidate by speaking with them.
Disclaimer: I have many friends who are HR managers, and only a few of them are ignorant. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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