In order to generate such descriptions, two things are required. What is required for pedagogical purposes are descriptions of the amount of vocabulary which is necessary to be functional in specific communicative contexts, not to match the language level of native speakers. This is still far out of reach for most second language (L2) learners, and it is not surprising that L2 teachers and textbook writers struggle with the sheer number of words that could be taught.
found that their New Zealand university undergraduates had an English vocabulary size of about 17,000 word families. Footnote 1 Even very proficient speakers will not know all of these words, Footnote 2 and Goulden et al. stimulate, stimulated, stimulating, stimulates, stimulation, stimulative), this translates into many hundreds of thousands of individual word forms. Given that most word families have several members (e.g. For example, Goulden, Nation & Read ( Reference Goulden, Nation and Read1990) estimated there are 54,000 word families in English. However, the lexicons of most languages are very large. Thus knowledge of vocabulary is fundamental to all language use, and so must be learned in some manner in order for learners to become communicative in a new language. People use language to communicate and express meaning, and this meaning is essentially conveyed by vocabulary. This article proposes approximate replications of Nation ( 2006), van Zeeland & Schmitt ( 2012), and Cobb ( 2007), in order to clarify these key coverage and size figures. Teachers and learners need to be able to set goals, and as Cobb's study of learning opportunities ( 2007) has shown, coverage percentages and their associated vocabulary knowledge requirements have important implications for the acquisition of new word knowledge through exposure to comprehensible L2 input. Getting these figures right for a variety of text modalities, genres and conditions of reading and listening is essential. But is this the definitive picture? A recent study by van Zeeland & Schmitt ( 2012) suggests that 95% coverage may be sufficient for listening comprehension, and that this can be reached with 2,000–3,000 word families, which is much more manageable. His exploration of the 98% figure through a variety of spoken and written corpora showed that knowledge of around 8,000–9,000 word families is needed for reading and 6,000–7,000 for listening.
This important finding prompts an important question: How much English vocabulary do English as a second language (ESL) learners need to know to achieve this crucial level of known-word coverage? A landmark paper by Nation ( 2006) provides a rather daunting answer. But remember, it is Just the STUDENT version that is set up like this.There is current research consensus that second language (L2) learners are able to adequately comprehend general English written texts if they know 98% of the words that occur in the materials. This dictionary is very PLEASING to read.the layout is pretty and easy-to-read.not like a lot of dictionaries. Though this STUDENT version has less words than larger dictionaries, it still has the most includes the words in sentences (in English and Spanish)to give examples of usage.
It has more than 6,000 words and expressions.Īnother FAVORITE resource of mine is the Larousse Spanish English Student dictionary. Though most words in Spanish are easy to pronunciate, I still ocassionally need to look up the pronunciation of a word and for that I mainly use Barron's (pocket edition) of Spanish vocabulary. The only thing it doesn't do is give the pronunciation for the words. It covers all kinds of important topical words in Spanish. I haven't had this book long, but it organizes related words together and then uses some of the words in example sentences-with the English definitions of the words and sentences.
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