How many words do your students need to know?

Ron MartinezUniversity of Oxford

11th Braz-Tesol July 17th, 2008

Talk outline

• How many words do experts claim students need to know?

• Beyond ‘words’, what can make a text difficult?

• New research evidence• Implications for language pedagogy (plus an

answer to the question)

How many words do native speakers know?

About 20,000 word families (e.g. Goulden et al, 1990; Zechmeister et al, 1995)

Word ‘families’?• A word family consists of a headword, its inflected forms, and its

closely derived forms. (Nation, 2001: 8)• please• pleased• pleasing• pleasure• pleasant• pleasurable• displeasure• displeased• unpleasant• etc...

What about language learners?

• 2,000 word families, providing around 80% text coverage, are enough to study at an English-language university. (Nation & Hwang, 1995)

• 80% = 1 word in every 5 is unknown.• 95% text coverage which is the minimum required for

adequate comprehension (Laufer, 1989) and successful guessing from context (Liu & Nation, 1985).

• For reading to be pleasurable, 98-99% coverage is desirable. (Hirsh & Nation, 1992)

• There is an obvious payoff for learners of English in concentrating initially on the 2,000 most frequent words, since they have been repeatedly shown to account for at least 80% of the running words in any written or spoken text. (Read, 2004: 148)

Is that the whole picture?

• This bus is red.• This bus is green.• This bus is yellow.

Reading is more than words, language is more than words.

• The principle of idiom is that a language user has available to him or her a large number of semi-preconstructed phrases that constitute single choices, even though they might appear to be analyzable into segments. (Sinclair 1991:110)

The frequency effect• There is a broad general tendency for frequent words ...

to have less of a clear and independent meaning than less frequent words or senses. These meanings of frequent words are difficult to identify and explain. (Sinclair, 1991: 113)

• For example, we think of verbs like see, give, keep, as having each a basic meaning: we would probably expect those meanings to be commonest. However, the database tells us that see is commonest in uses like I see, you see, give in uses like give a talk and keep in uses like keep warm. (Sinclair, 1987: vii)

have

havehave tohave fun

have a laugh

have a heartI’ve had it

have it rough...or what have you

have it out with

have one’s way

have your sayHave you ever...

have a seat

have a good timehave a look

• Common words, other than those from the grammatical closed classes such as pronouns or prepositions, are common precisely because they occur in so many expressions. (Lewis, 1998: 23)

The most common wordsare only tips of

collocational icebergs

Summary• In L2 reading instruction, vocabulary is gaining in importance, although both

the notion of nuclear vocabulary and the related notion of teaching the 2,000 most frequent core words for reading tend to simplify the issues centering on vocabulary development. (Grabe, 2002: 280)

• …vocabulary lists which consist only of single words risk losing sight of the fact that many high frequency chunks are more frequent and more central to communication than even very frequent words. (O’Keefe, McCarthy & Carter, 2007: 69)

• The overall conclusion regarding the vocabulary of the advanced level frequency bands must be that, as at the basic level, the single-word frequency list alone is not sufficient and must be supplemented by chunks… (O’Keefe, McCarthy & Carter, 2007: 53)

Conclusions• Common words are not ‘easy’.• 2,000 of the most common words can only provide 80%

text coverage if the text contains no collocations or other multi-word expressions. (Not realistic.)

• Students will often believe that they understand a text simply because they understand the individual words.

• Proficiency seems to have little effect on the uptake of collocations in text.

• Current word frequency lists have questionable validity for informing pedagogical policy and materials development.

References