| Why & how to use frequency lists to learn words
By Tom Cobb Frequency-based wordlists can help you expand your English vocabulary by telling you which words you should try to learn. These lists contain the words that are very common in English, but that you are unlikely to discover in a random or natural manner. Learning your first language, you had enough time at your disposal to discover all of its common words and learn them without trying. But in a second language, in most cases there is simply not enough time for this to occur. Why? Because many common words and phrases are nonetheless not all that common, occurring only a few times per million words of natural text. How many million words of English are you likely to read this year? Moreover, several encounters with each word (probably about ten) are needed for stable learning to occur. Why would you want to learn the frequent words of English? For the simple reason that English, like any language, has the habit of recycling a relatively small number of words over and over again, and if you know these words then your reading power can be enhanced dramatically for a relatively modest learning investment. With a random or 'discovery' approach to lexical growth, you will learn many words that are rare and relatively useless for you, yet you will fail to notice the words that recur often enough to repay the effort of learning. The word lists presented on this website are the result of more than 50 years work and are based on large scale computational analysis of English text and speech corpora. They are intended to deliver the main words of English to you in a shortened time frame, and deliver along with them enough contextual and definitional information to get solid learning underway. How small a number are these 'main words' that are recycled over and over in English (or any other language)? Suppose your goal is to read academic English texts with good comprehension, and to use reading as a way to expand your vocabulary still further. In that case, your first goal should be to make sure you know the 2000 most frequent word families of English (headwords and their main inflections and derivations), because these words make up roughly 80% of the individual words (word tokens) in any English text. You could, of course, wait and meet these words "naturally" in the normal course of reading the texts that interest you, but this takes a long time. An alternative is to meet these words in convenient lists provided on this website. While it is true that nothing can replace the experience of meeting new words in rich natural contexts, some of this experience has been reproduced for you here by linking the word lists to a computer program called a "concordance", and from there to the dictionary Wordnet. A concordance provides several contexts for each word, derived from a large collection of texts called a corpus. Is reading these computer contexts as useful as meeting words in natural contexts? Probably not, but research by Cobb (1997) suggests that using computer concordances can get the learning process off to a good start. In fact, research has shown that reading in a second language is reliably successful, and supports further vocabulary acquisition, when at least 95% of the individual words (word tokens) in a text are known. With fewer than that, the reader does not have enough to go on (Laufer 1989; 1992; Hirsh and Nation, 1992). The good news is the 2000 list and the AWL together, a combined list of 2570 words, can bring the coverage of an academic text up to approximately 90%. In other words, if you know the first 2000 plus 570 AWL words, then you know about 90% of the words you will meet in any academic text. Adapted and simplified from http://www.lextutor.ca/research/ |
| You can find an interesting and useful tool for highlighting vocabulary for study at The Complete Lexical Tutor. You need your text in a form that you can copy and paste by computer. Select your text. Copy it to your computer clipboard. Then go to the Web VP (Vocabulary Profiler) and select all of the text in the big white box. Paste the text you have previously copied into the box. Then click on the in the bottom right corner. Your text will be highlighted in blue (first 1000 words), green (second 1000 words), yellow (Academic Word List), and red (Off-list Words). |
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| 1000 Word List - basic list - word families |
| 2000 Word List - basic list - word families |
| Academic Word List - basic list - word families |
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