How Many Words Do Students Need in Their Vocabularies?

Work Teaching English in Taiwan
1

Perhaps a better question would be: At what point is one’s vocabularly sufficient to allow one to comprehend, either verbally or in print, what one is hearing or reading?

I’ve heard that a student who understands 5,000 of the most commonly used English words will have a sufficient vocabulary to be able to communicate, listen, and read most of what he encounters in English.

Most GRE preparation classes review 10,000 or more vocabularly words, so it seems to me than an educated native speaker’s vocabulary should be around 15,000 words. My reasoning is that the most commonly used words are used again and again.

I suppose you also need to consider whether to include different forms of the same word. For example, the adjective “common” can be used as an adverb, “commonly.” Seems to me that that would count as only one word, whereas words like “convenient” and “convenience” would count as two separate words.

This question should also consider the role of phrases and phrasal verbs in supporting one’s understanding of the English language.

I’m obviously no expert. I teach people how to take tests. I’m looking for some expert opinions here.

2

I’ve heard the figure 1800, but that means really knowing them – that is, instantaneous reaction when the words are heard either individually or in context, no decoding lag, and the ability to instantly retrieve that word for productive speech.

That’s a reasonable goal. Unfortunately, Taiwan will never go for it (“But they’re not LEARNING anything! They can’t even fill in blanks on a test!”) :noway:

3

[quote=“ironlady”]
(“But they’re not LEARNING anything! They can’t even fill in blanks on a test!”) :noway:[/quote]
Fill in the blanks: the fifth language skill (after reading, writing, listening and speaking).
Matching: the sixth language skill.
What the fuck am I on about. These two are obviously the first and second language skills. Reading, writing, speaking and listening are clearly subordinate. Actually being able to understand or produce real English won’t get you anywhere in Taiwan. :laughing:

4

LOL! :laughing: Let’s promote “the 2 plus 4 plan” then!

5

The vocabulary of an educated native speaker is thousands and thousands of words more than 15,000! Just as an example, the average educated native speaker probably knows 200 words for “dog.” (Don’t believe me? Take a look through a listing of dog breeds and see how many you DON’T recognize.) If such an unimportant subset of your total vocabulary can include 200 words, your total vocabulary must be enormous. Most of the words we know are words we rarely use, but we still know them.
Of course, how many should students know? I’ve read that 95% of native speaker conversation uses 2,000 words. I’ve always wanted to use a textbook that taught these 2,000 words, but so far I’ve never seen one. One of the problems is that what most people think of as common words actually are not frequently used. They tend to be common THINGS, not frequently used words. As an example: apple. Most people would think it’s a common word. It is usually taught to beginners. But think about it - how often do you actually say it? You probably eat an apple more often than you say the word.
By the way, if anyone knows of a Chinese textbook that uses the 2,000 most common spoken Chinese words as its base, please tell me.

6

Check out frequency lists available on the Internet. There’s even a Chinese one, if I remember correctly – I think it was by the Mormons. Didn’t look too bad, although I haven’t gotten around to playing with it much. I’ll probably use it as a basis if I have time to think about a textbook or materials in the future. (Now that I’m out of school – YEAHHH!!! :laughing: :laughing: :raspberry: )

7

Here are a few links I found through a google.com search:

Top 1,000 Words (American English): http://esl.about.com/library/vocabulary/bl1000_list1.htm

Top 3,000 Words in Periodicals (American magazines and newspapers): http://www.paulnoll.com/China/Teach/English-3000-common-words.html

Top 300 English Words (in order of frequency): http://www.clmn.net/cer/pdf/Commonlyusedwords.pdf

The 1,000 Most Commonly Used Words in American and British English (This one looks a bit dodgy): http://www.englishforjapanese.com/reference/vocab%20list%20pre-intermediate.pdf

Still looking for a definitive number. My sense is that most adult students should be shooting for a basic vocabulary of 2,000 of the most commonly used words. I’m talking about them being able to use them. Then, it’s a matter of reading about and listenging to what interests you as you slowly fill in the the blanks. Sort of like what I do with Mandarin.

Surely there are ESL professionals who can give us a concrete number and link to those words:help: .

8

To write the Collins Cobuild English Dictionary for Advanced Learners they dumped twenty million words of real Engish into computers that allowed them to count actual frequencies. Most of thse words came from newspapers, radio and magazines. Regular conversation was the most difficult to sample for obvious reasons. Anyway according to them the most common 1720 words (which they list by the way) make up 75% of all English usage. There is another list of 1580, containing words like aggressive and medicine that “extend the range of things that you can talk about.” Duh.
It would be more useful to ask how many words “and expressions” a person needs to know to be able to understand most of what he hears and be able to say what he wants to say. Also should homonyms be counted as one word or two or three as the case may be. Noun, adjective… forms are usually just forms of one word. And light as in “light my cigarette” and light as in “this is light butter” are just two of the many meanings of one spelling and one pronunciation. They are still more things to learn. So how to count? The trick is not just to teach the most common words but also the most common meanings of each of those words, and also their most common forms. The problem is nobody knows exactly what these words, meanings and forms are yet. By the time they figure it out they will probably be a few years behind the times. Especially if colloquial language is taken into account.
Another problem develops when you try defining the word know. There are lots of words I recognize and could probably guess the meaning of in context but if you asked for a clear definition of the word in isolation I’d be stumped.
You will need to define both the word “know” and the word “word” before the question makes much sense. Fun huh?

9

More important than ‘learning’ a vocabulary list, is helping your students develop the skills necessary to read or listen and figure out the meanings of words and texts as a whole. And I reckon reading’s the key here. The Grade 1 and 2 kids that I teach take home chapter books to read, and there’s a whole lot of words in there that they don’t understand, but they still follow the story. When they encounter words they don’t know, they either figure them out from the context or just skip them, but still follow the main idea of the story (and probably pick up the word later after encountering it more).

Brian

10

Language also doesn’t occur in just words. Someone could possibly know the meanings of 2,000 of the most common words, but have a hard time reading if they lack knowledge of idioms, collocations, and phrasal verbs which occur often (and probably make up half of the occurances of at least 50 of the most common words in English). It’s not merely a matter of remembering words. There are groups of words that have a single meaning or idea behind them which involves not only knowing the words involved, but how they change when put together…

11

To complicate things even further, many word combinations, especially phrasal verbs, have more than one meaning. So is bring up, as in bring up a topic, bring up my diner (puke) and bring up a child be counted as three seperate expressions or one? I would say three but which of the three is most common? Collins lists them in order of the frequencies that they discovered but it would be difficult to rate their frequency against other words. I think we are getting closer to a useful question anyway. And it also seems obvious that word combinations should be taught at every level.

12

Yes, yes, it is quite obvious that knowing a bunch of words but having no idea how to use them in word combinations isn’t very useful, particularly in the case of writing and speaking.

The point is, you can’t get to word combinations if you don’t know the general meanings of the words used in those combinations. I’m talking about foundation vocabulary here, and I was trying to get at a number. I found the answer myself–approximately 1800 words are used in 90% of English sentences.

I’m not going to use a long list of common words in class, telling them to go and memorize them. They have been exposed to most of those words through six years of English instruction in the school system here I was more interested in comforting students by letting them know that a foundation vocab isn’t that difficult to master. They are probably already there. Combine that with lots of reading and listening practice, wherein you are exposed to how these words are used together and in context, and you’re on your way to understanding English at a deeper level.

13

Sorry but the 1800 figure still doesn’t do much for me if I am not sure what it is counting. For example, are communicate and communication listed seperately or as one word? Or it could happen that beacuse of frequency rates one of those words is in the list and the other isn’t. I take it words like “take” and “make” are listed as just one word each? Yipes! And just because someone can recognize a word, take “is” for example, certainly doesn’t mean that they will ever actually be able to use it consistently correctly. I think we need to be working on a better question. Something like…er…Ironlady?

14

If there’s any group that could come up with such a list, it’d definitely be the Mormons. Now if someone came up with a English teaching style based upon how Mormon’s teach their church members…hmm…

15

Tomas,

Thanks for the links to those websites (even the dodgy one :smiley:) But, do you, or anyone else, know of any hard copy versions of such lists? I have a student who wants to build his vocabulary.

His listening, reading, conversation skills, etc… are all fairly good as it is. He just wants to add more vocab.

And for those with concerns, we always talk in class about “dissecting” words, finding their roots, etc… In fact, I usually suggest he (and my other students) try to figure out what the word means from the context, the roots, and such, before looking in the dictionary. Then using the dictionary to confirm/see if his analysis was correct and/or get the correct definition.

I also usually bring up the ideas of idioms, etc… which may change their meanings. So, he is aware that sometimes he can’t just look at the individual words (even when he knows what they mean) and comprehend the sentence.

16

I’d strongly recommend reading Paul Nation for some excellent insight into this issue. Also, John Read has written some fine texts on vocabulary assessment.

Several people have mentioned what it means to “know” a word. This is an excellent point, and some texts mention 7 or 8 aspects of knowing a word, including, meaning, spelling, collocations, etc.

I think serious emphasis needs to be placed on the 2,000 HF words. Intensive research has shown the most common 2,000 words make up some 85% of what we read and 91% of what we say and hear. Those are some pretty serious numbers.

(Incidentally, one interesting study showed that the most common 100 words made up 49% of a corpus.)

Now, beyond knowing those words, an additional 2-3,000 words should be ample for fluency.

As to the question of specialized vocabulary, that can be acquired as necessary. Someone interested in cars may learn how to say ‘anti-lock steering’ - that sort of thing.

The problem, as alluded to, is s’s don’t really know the thousands of words crammed into their heads. High school s’s are supposed to know 7,000 words upon graduating. It is unlikely that the average s’t knows more than a few thousand, if that.

Fortunately, more and more people are getting keen to the importance of HF lists and such, and the research is making its way from applied-linguistics research to mainstream pedagogy.

By the way, Nation will be attending this year’s ETA!

17

Just because you can’t say something doesn’t mean you can’t know it. Don’t believe me? What does a piano sound like? Go on, tell me.

A criterion for knowing a word would be something like: being able to use the word in the way that it is used by expert speakers of that language.

18

What I said was that I am fairly certain that there a lot of words whose meaning I could guess in context but that I would not be able to produce myself even when the situation demanded it. That is half knowing at best.

19

Do a search for ‘DOLCH’ on the internet. This is a series of graded word lists (pre-kindergarten to Grade 3), containing the most common words found in children’s books. There is also a list of the most common nouns and phrases.

As far as I know this system is used in the US by most elementary school teachers. In New Zealand we do not use it, but we have our own list of common words which are used for graded spelling tests right through primary school.

When teaching this it needs to be used with lots of story books to give it meaning. Do not get the students to memorize the lists out of context.

20

lextutor.ca/research/

Just found some fairly comprehensive word lists, together with explanations of what they actually mean.

According to these dudes, the first 1000 word families account for 72% of most English anyone is likely to encounter. The next 1000 only push you up to the region of 80%. Apparently, the next most common words are still so rare that you would have to learn 6000 or so to get up to 90% if you studied exclusively on the basis of how often the words occur.

They’ve added a further 570 or so that appear commonly in academic texts, and claim that with this vocab of ~2600 words you should be able to get 90% of what you’re reading in an academic settnig. Enough to infer the rest?