scholarly journals How large can a receptive vocabulary be?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
R Goulden ◽  
Paul Nation ◽  
J Read
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Receptive Vocabulary ◽  
Vocabulary Size ◽  
Acquisition Rate ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Native Speakers Of English ◽  
Methodological Problems ◽  
Oxford University Press

Studies of vocabulary size based on dictionary sampling have faced several methodological problems. These problems occur in trying to answer the following three questions: (I) How do we decide what to count as words? (2) How do we choose what words to test? (3) How do we test the chosen words? The present study attempts to overcome these problems and checks in several ways to see if the problems have been overcome. The results indicate that what were previously thought of as conservative estimates of vocabulary size are likely to be the most accurate. These estimates suggest that well-educated adult native speakers of English have a vocabulary of around 17,000 base words. This represents an acquisition rate of around two to three words per day. © 1990 Oxford University Press.

scholarly journals How large can a receptive vocabulary be?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
R Goulden ◽  
Paul Nation ◽  
J Read
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Receptive Vocabulary ◽  
Vocabulary Size ◽  
Acquisition Rate ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Native Speakers Of English ◽  
Methodological Problems ◽  
Oxford University Press

Studies of vocabulary size based on dictionary sampling have faced several methodological problems. These problems occur in trying to answer the following three questions: (I) How do we decide what to count as words? (2) How do we choose what words to test? (3) How do we test the chosen words? The present study attempts to overcome these problems and checks in several ways to see if the problems have been overcome. The results indicate that what were previously thought of as conservative estimates of vocabulary size are likely to be the most accurate. These estimates suggest that well-educated adult native speakers of English have a vocabulary of around 17,000 base words. This represents an acquisition rate of around two to three words per day. © 1990 Oxford University Press.

scholarly journals Measuring the vocabulary size of native speakers of English in New Zealand secondary schools

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Averil Coxhead ◽  
Paul Nation ◽  
D Sim
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Secondary School ◽  
Secondary Schools ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
General Purpose ◽  
Vocabulary Size ◽  
Subject Specific ◽  
Native Speakers Of English ◽  
Research In Education ◽  
Size Estimates

© 2015 New Zealand Association for Research in Education. The primary aim of this study was to examine the vocabulary size of native speakers of English in New Zealand secondary schools. Two equivalent forms of the 20,000 version of the vocabulary size test were used in this study. Two hundred and twenty-seven 13-18-year-old native speakers of English at secondary school took an individually administered version of the test. The data from this study fits with the vocabulary size estimates for younger native speakers of Biemiller and Slonim (J Educ Psychol 93:498-520, 2001). The results suggest that most native speakers at secondary school have enough general purpose vocabulary to cope with their reading at school, and any deliberate attention to vocabulary should focus on subject-specific vocabulary.

scholarly journals Measuring the vocabulary size of native speakers of English in New Zealand secondary schools

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Averil Coxhead ◽  
Paul Nation ◽  
D Sim
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Secondary School ◽  
Secondary Schools ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
General Purpose ◽  
Vocabulary Size ◽  
Subject Specific ◽  
Native Speakers Of English ◽  
Research In Education ◽  
Size Estimates

© 2015 New Zealand Association for Research in Education. The primary aim of this study was to examine the vocabulary size of native speakers of English in New Zealand secondary schools. Two equivalent forms of the 20,000 version of the vocabulary size test were used in this study. Two hundred and twenty-seven 13-18-year-old native speakers of English at secondary school took an individually administered version of the test. The data from this study fits with the vocabulary size estimates for younger native speakers of Biemiller and Slonim (J Educ Psychol 93:498-520, 2001). The results suggest that most native speakers at secondary school have enough general purpose vocabulary to cope with their reading at school, and any deliberate attention to vocabulary should focus on subject-specific vocabulary.

scholarly journals Word families

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurie Bauer ◽  
Paul Nation
Keyword(s):  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Systematic Approach ◽  
Vocabulary Size ◽  
Lexical Development ◽  
Related Form ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Word Families ◽  
Inflectional Affixes ◽  
Oxford University Press

The idea of a word family is important for a systematic approach to vocabulary teaching and for deciding the vocabulary load of texts. Inclusion of a related form of a word within a word family depends on criteria involving frequency, regularity, productivity and predictability. These criteria are applied to English affixes so that the inflectional affixes and the most useful derivational affixes are arranged into a graded set of seven levels. This set of levels and others like it have value in guiding teaching and learning, in standardising vocabulary load and vocabulary size research, in investigating lexical development and lexical storage, and in guiding dictionary making. © 1993 Oxford University Press.

scholarly journals Words that go together

2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 401-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ewa Dąbrowska
Keyword(s):  
Convergent Validity ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Linguistic Knowledge ◽  
Choice Test ◽  
Print Exposure ◽  
Language Experience ◽  
Vocabulary Size ◽  
Instrument Measuring ◽  
Native Speakers Of English ◽  
Test Retest Reliability

Although formulaic language has been studied extensively from both a linguistic and psycholinguistic perspective, little is known about the relationship between individual speakers’ knowledge of collocations and their linguistic experience, or between collocational knowledge and other aspects of linguistic knowledge. This is partly because work in these areas has been hampered by lack of an adequate instrument measuring speakers’ knowledge of collocations. This paper describes the development of such an instrument, the “Words that go together” (WGT) test, and some preliminary research using it. The instrument is a multiple choice test consisting of 40 items of varying frequency and collocation strength. The test was validated with a sample of 80 adult native speakers of English. Test-retest reliability was 0.80 and split-half reliability was 0.88. Convergent validity was established by comparing participants’ scores with measures expected to correlate with language experience (print exposure, education, and age) and other linguistic abilities (vocabulary size, grammatical comprehension); divergent validity was established by comparing test scores with nonverbal IQ. The results of the validation study are then used to compare speakers’ performance on the WGT with corpus-based measures of collocation strength (mutual information, z-score, t-score and simple frequency); however, no statistically reliable relationships were found.

scholarly journals Word families

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurie Bauer ◽  
Paul Nation
Keyword(s):  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Systematic Approach ◽  
Vocabulary Size ◽  
Lexical Development ◽  
Related Form ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Word Families ◽  
Inflectional Affixes ◽  
Oxford University Press

The idea of a word family is important for a systematic approach to vocabulary teaching and for deciding the vocabulary load of texts. Inclusion of a related form of a word within a word family depends on criteria involving frequency, regularity, productivity and predictability. These criteria are applied to English affixes so that the inflectional affixes and the most useful derivational affixes are arranged into a graded set of seven levels. This set of levels and others like it have value in guiding teaching and learning, in standardising vocabulary load and vocabulary size research, in investigating lexical development and lexical storage, and in guiding dictionary making. © 1993 Oxford University Press.

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