Research Article
27 October 2006

How Large a Vocabulary is Needed For Reading and Listening?

Publication: Canadian Modern Language Review
Volume 63, Number 1

Abstract

Abstract

This article has two goals: to report on the trialling of fourteen 1,000 word-family lists made from the British National Corpus, and to use these lists to see what vocabulary size is needed for unassisted comprehension of written and spoken English. The trialling showed that the lists were properly sequenced and there were no glaring omissions from the lists. If 98% coverage of a text is needed for unassisted comprehension, then a 8,000 to 9,000 word-family vocabulary is needed for comprehension of written text and a vocabulary of 6,000 to 7,000 for spoken text.

Résumé

L'article a pour objectif de parler des essais menés sur quatorze listes de 1 000 familles de mots tirées du British National Corpus et de l'emploi de ces listes pour évaluer la taille du vocabulaire nécessaire afin de comprendre sans aide l'anglais oral et écrit. Les essais ont révélé que les listes sont adéquatement triées et ne contiennent aucune omission manifeste. Si ondoit connaître 98 % des mots d'un texte pour le comprendre sans aide, il faut un vocabulaire de 8 000 à 9 000 familles de mots pour comprendre un texte écrit et un vocabulaire de 6 000 à 7 000 mots pour un texte oral.

Get full access to this article

View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.

References

Adolphs, S., & Schmitt, N. (2003). Lexical coverage of spoken discourse. Applied Linguistics, 24(4), 425-438.
Adolphs, S., & Schmitt, N. (2004). Vocabulary coverage according to spoken discourse context. In P. Bogaards & B. Laufer (Eds.), Vocabulary in a second language: Selection, acquisition, and testing (pp. 39-49). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Bauer, L., & Nation, I.S.P. (1993). Word families. International Journal of Lexicography, 6(4), 253-279.
Bertram, R., Baayen, R., & Schreuder, R. (2000). Effects of family size for complex words. Journal of Memory and Language, 42, 390-405.
Bertram, R., Laine, M., & Virkkala, M. (2000). The role of derivational morphology in vocabulary acquisition: Get by with a little help from my morpheme friends. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 41(4), 287-296.
Carver, R.P. (1994). Percentage of unknown vocabulary words in text as a function of the relative difficulty of the text: Implications for instruction. Journal of Reading Behavior 26(4), 413-437.
Chung, T.M. (2003). A corpus comparison approach for terminology extraction. Terminology, 9(2), 221-245.
Coxhead, A. (2000). A new academic word list. TESOL Quarterly, 34(2), 213-238.
Goulden, R., Nation, P., & Read, J. (1990). How large can a receptive vocabulary be? Applied Linguistics, 11(4), 341-363.
Grant, L. (2003). A corpus-based investigation of idiomatic multi-word units. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
Grant, L., & Nation, I.S.P. (2006). How many idioms are there in English? ITL - International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 151, 1-14.
Hirsh, D., & Nation, P. (1992). What vocabulary size is needed to read unsimplified texts for pleasure? Reading in a Foreign Language, 8(2), 689-696.
Hu, M., & Nation, I.S.P. (2000). Vocabulary density and reading comprehension. Reading in a Foreign Language, 13(1), 403-430.
ICAME. (2006). International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English. Retrieved June 24, 2006 from http://icame.uib.no/
Kurnia, N. (2003). Retention of multi-word strings and meaning derivation from L2 reading. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
Laufer, B., Elder, C., Hill, K., & Congdon, P. (2004). Size and strength: Do we need both to measure vocabulary knowledge? Language Testing, 21, 202-226.
Leech, G., Rayson, P., & Wilson, A. (2001). Word frequencies in written and spoken English. Harlow, UK: Longman.
Nagy, W.E., & Anderson, R.C. (1984). How many words are there in printed school English? Reading Research Quarterly, 19(3), 304-330.
Nagy, W.E., Anderson, R., Schommer, M., Scott, J.A., & Stallman, A. (1989). Morphological families in the internal lexicon. Reading Research Quarterly, 24(3), 263-282.
Nation, I.S.P. (1993). Using dictionaries to estimate vocabulary size: Essential, but rarely followed, procedures. Language Testing, 10(1), 27-40.
Nation, I.S.P. (2004). A study of the most frequent word families in the British National Corpus. In P. Bogaards & B. Laufer (Eds.), Vocabulary in a second language: Selection, acquisition, and testing (pp. 3-13). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Nation, I.S.P., & Heatley, A. (2002). Range: A program for the analysis of vocabulary in texts [software]. Downloadable from http://www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/staff/paul-nation/nation.aspx
Read, J. (1988). Measuring the vocabulary knowledge of second language learners. RELC Journal, 19(2), 12-25.
Thorndike, E.L., & Lorge, I. (1944). The teacher's word book of 30,000 words. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University.
Wang, K., & Nation, P. (2004). Word meaning in academic English: Homography in the Academic Word List. Applied Linguistics, 25, 291-314.
Ward, J. (1999). How large a vocabulary do EAP Engineering students need? Reading in a Foreign Language, 12(2), 309-323.
West, M. (1953). A general service list of English words. London: Longman, Green.
Xue, G., & Nation, I.S.P. (1984). A university word list. Language Learning and Communication, 3, 215-229.
Zechmeister, E.B., Chronis, A.M., Cull, W.L., D'Anna, C.A., & Healy, N.A. (1995). Growth of a functionally important lexicon. Journal of Reading Behavior, 27(2), 201-212.

Information & Authors

Information

Published In

Go to The Canadian Modern Language Review
Canadian Modern Language Review
Volume 63Number 1September/septembre 2006
Pages: 59 - 82

History

Published in print: September/septembre 2006
Published online: 27 October 2006

Authors

Affiliations

I. Nation
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Metrics & Citations

Metrics

VIEW ALL METRICS

Related Content

Citations

If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.

Format





Download article citation data for:
I. Nation
The Canadian Modern Language Review 2006 63:1, 59-82

View Options

Restore your content access

Enter your email address to restore your content access:

Note: This functionality works only for purchases done as a guest. If you already have an account, log in to access the content to which you are entitled.

View options

PDF

View PDF

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Copy the content Link

Share on social media

About Cookies On This Site

We use cookies to improve user experience on our website and measure the impact of our content.

Learn more

×