Self-Study English

Category: Vocabulary

  • Useful Websites for Vocabulary Learning – Medium Frequency ‘General’ Vocabulary

    In the last blog post, I explained how you could use dictionaries and text checkers to identify useful vocabulary to learn and remember. In that post, I focused on the 3,000 most frequent words in English. However, to get to higher levels of English, achieve a high score on the IELTS and to be able to read academic texts at university, you will need to know a lot more than 3,000 words.

    According to Nation (2006), you need to have a vocabulary of about 6,000 to 7,000 words in order to have a good understanding (98% of all words) of a spoken text such as a movie, whereas for written texts such as novels and newspapers, this increases to about 8,000 to 9,000 words.

    Before deciding on what words to focus on, it might also be useful for you to do a vocabulary size test. You can do one at this website and it should take less than one hour to complete.

    You might also be interested to know how many words you need to know to be at each level of English. Now, this is a difficult question to answer as it depends on how you measure when a learner knows a word. For example, there will be a big difference between receptive vocabulary (what you can understand, i.e. in reading and listening) and productive vocabulary (what you can use, i.e. in speaking and writing).

     The only research paper I could find gave the following estimates for vocabulary sizes:

    Taken from: Milton, J., & Alexiou, T. (2009). Vocabulary size and the common European framework of reference for languages. In Vocabulary studies in first and second language acquisition (pp. 194-211). Palgrave Macmillan, London.

    However, I am a little unsure of these numbers, especially at the higher levels as most C1 level learners could probably understand most words in a film and even in novels that are not too difficult. Therefore, I would expect the vocabulary level to be higher at both C1 and C2 level, especially as very few learners ever achieve a C2 level of English.

    Although this is not an academic source, so perhaps less reliable, I found the following discussion online and I feel that some of the estimates here to be more realistic, e.g.

    Taken from: https://languagelearning.stackexchange.com/questions/3061/what-are-estimates-of-vocabulary-size-for-each-cefr-level

    This estimate suggests that the number of words required doubles to reach the next level rather than increasing by about 500 words for each level. Although this is not based on any research evidence, the above estimates do seem to be more likely than the previous estimates, especially for the higher levels.

    As a useful reference, the image below shows roughly how the different CEFR levels (A1-C2) relate to the IELTS exam. Whichever scale from above you use, it is clear that you are going to need over 3,000 words to achieve a score of 6.5 or higher on the IELTS test.

    Taken from: https://www.ielts.org/about-ielts/ielts-in-cefr-scale

    In the previous post, I mentioned the Oxford 3000 list. There is also an Oxford 5000 word list, so if you think you know most of the words at the 3,000 word level, then it would be worth focusing on the additional 2,000 word on the Oxford 5000 list.

    As with the Oxford 3000, we can also use a text checker to find out what words are on the Oxford 5000 list by copying and pasting a text into the box, e.g. below shows the results (up to B1 level) for the Oxford 3000 list.

    Taken from: https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/text-checker/result

    And below shows the results for the Oxford 5000 list (B2 and C1 level), not including all the words at in the Oxford 3000 list.

    Taken from: https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/text-checker/result

    If you are high-level learner (C1-C2 level) and want to learn more than the most frequent 5,000 words, you can also use the Longman Dictionary that was mentioned in a previous post to find the most common frequent vocabulary. As can be seen below, the Longman Dictionary sometimes has red circles next to each word.

    Three red circles represents:

    • High Frequency (0 to 3,000 most common words)

    Two red circles represents:

    • Medium Frequency (3,000 – 6,000 most common words)

    One red circle represents:

    • Lower Frequency (6,000 – 9,000 most common words)

    If we search for the word ‘manufacture’, we can see that there are two red circles next to the word, which shows that this is a medium frequency word:

    Taken from: https://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/manufacture

    Likewise, if search for the word ‘unrealistic’, we can see that there is one red circle next to the word, which means it is a lower frequency word, but still one of the most common 9,000 words, so it might be useful for advanced level learners.

    Taken from: https://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/unrealistic

    However, vocabulary lists are probably more useful when they are either for higher frequency words (as the lists are more likely to be accurate) and for specific vocabulary. Therefore, you should be careful about using these lists as the reliability of them depends on the kind of texts that have been used to create a database of language. Whilst I would assume that these dictionaries have quite reliable databases, there will be some differences, especially for lower frequency vocabulary as they won’t have used exactly the same texts.

    It is also worth mentioning that this kind of self-study activity should only be one part of your vocabulary learning. An even bigger part of your vocabulary learning should be through getting lots of input as I have shown in previous blog posts (see here and here).

    References:

    Milton, J., & Alexiou, T. (2009). Vocabulary size and the common European framework of reference for languages. In Vocabulary studies in first and second language acquisition (pp. 194-211). Palgrave Macmillan, London.

    Nation, I.S.P. (2006). How large a vocabulary is needed for reading and listening? Canadian Modern Language Review, 63(1), 59-82.

  • Useful Websites for Vocabulary Learning – Frequent ‘General’ Vocabulary

    In the previous post, I mentioned how research into academic texts show that the majority of words in a text are words that are very common in ‘general’ English. This means that they are just as common in everyday conversation as they are in academic English, and they are not too specific to a particular subject, e.g. Law, Medicine, Engineering, etc.

    While most learners preparing for the IELTS test will know a lot of these words already, there may be some that learners don’t already know. The research I mentioned in my previous post (see Coxhead, 2000) used a list of the most common 2,000 words in English, but this list is very old, so it’s probably worth using a more recent list. However, most of the recent word lists for ‘general’ vocabulary seem to cover roughly the most common 3,000 words in English, but it’s probably worthwhile learning these extra 1,000 words (and more) if your aim is to study in English at university in the future as learning 2,000 ‘general’ words + 570 ‘academic’ words (from the Academic Word List) would still mean that you only know around 85% of words in an academic text, which isn’t enough to get a good understand of a text. (Incidentally, research suggests that the percentage of words needed to have a good understanding of a written text is probably at least 95% and more likely closer to 98%.)

    In the previous post, I mentioned how the Longman Dictionary can help you to identify academic words, and it can also be used to help identify common ‘general’ vocabulary. For example, if we search for the word ‘unfortunately’, we can see three red circles followed by ‘S1’ and ‘W3’. This means that the word is one of the most common 1,000 words in spoken English (S1) and one of the 3,000 most common words in written English (W3). In other words, it is more common in spoken English than written English. Although it might not be on the Academic Word List, it is still important to know this word because it is common in both spoken and written English.

    Taken from: https://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/unfortunately

    So, any word that we search for in the Longman dictionary that has three red circles next to it and/or either S or W with either a 1, 2 or 3 next to it is going to be a useful word to know and learn. Some of these words will also appear on the Academic Word List, but that’s OK, e.g. see below for ‘analysis’:

    Taken from: https://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/analysis

    Oxford Dictionaries also gives information about the most important 3,000 words using a text checker(Oxford Text Checker) with its Oxford 3,000 word list. By copying and pasting a text into the text checker, it can highlight which words are the most important 3,000 words in English and at what level most learners know this word by using different colours, e.g. if we use the first paragraph of this blog post, then the Oxford Text Checker produces the following result:

    Taken from: https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/text-checker/

    Any word in black is not part of the most important 3,000 words.

    Similar to the colours in the text checker above, the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary also indicates the different levels at which a learner should know a word, e.g. for ‘unfortunately’, it indicates that A2 (pre-intermediate) level learners should know this word, as shown below:

    Taken from: https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/unfortunately

    Similarly, for ‘analysis’, it is indicated that B1 (intermediate) level learners should know this word:

    Taken from: https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/analysis

    We can also see from ‘OPAL W’ and ‘OPAL S’ that this word is common on both written academic English and spoken academic English (OPAL = Oxford Phrasal Academic Lexicon).

    So, these are a couple of useful ways in which dictionaries and text checkers can be useful to help you identify frequent ‘general’ vocabulary. In the next blog post, I will look at medium-frequency ‘general’ vocabulary, which will be especially useful for higher-level learners.

    References

    Coxhead, A. (2000). A new academic word list. TESOL quarterly, 34(2), 213-238.

  • Useful Websites for Vocabulary Learning – Academic Vocabulary

    In previous posts, I have explained the importance of developing implicit language knowledge in order to become fluent in English at a high level. We can do this mostly by getting the right kind of input (see here, here and here). By doing lots of reading and listening we are learning vocabulary incidentally (implicitly). In other words, we are developing our implicit vocabulary knowledge by reading and listening for meaning rather than through any deliberate focus on learning vocabulary. This type of learning is obviously very important, but it can also be supported through learning vocabulary deliberately (explicitly). Here, we are developing explicit vocabulary knowledge, but doing this can also help to develop our implicit vocabulary knowledge. It does this because it: a) helps to give us more repetitions, so that we learn faster, and b) helps us to be able to read and listen to more difficult texts, therefore allowing us to get more input, which we know helps develop our implicit vocabulary knowledge.

    Remember though that implicit language knowledge is really important for developing fluency in a foreign language, so it is important that deliberate vocabulary learning is used in addition to getting lots of input, and not a replacement for it. In my opinion, you should still spend considerably more time on getting input through reading and listening compared to deliberate vocabulary learning.

    However, when doing deliberate vocabulary learning, it is very important that it is targeted, so that the most useful kind of vocabulary is learnt. Obviously, for students who are preparing for the IELTS test, vocabulary that is frequent in the texts for the reading and listening components will be useful as well as vocabulary that can be used in the speaking and writing components.

    One way we can help to focus our vocabulary learning is by thinking about the type of vocabulary that is likely to be seen in reading and listening texts as well as be useful to use in the writing and speaking components. One way of doing this is by looking at some research (see Coxhead, 2000) into academic texts. This research showed that these texts generally had the following profile:

    This diagram helps to show that we need to focus on the most common general words in English as these account for around three-quarters of all words in an academic text. However, these 2,000 words that are referred to above are taken from a word list that was created nearly seventy years ago (see West, 1953), so it might be a good idea to find a more up-to-date list of words to focus on.

    Furthermore, most learners who are preparing for IELTS will already know most of these 2,000 words, so I am going to focus on learning ‘academic’ words in this post. The previously mentioned research (see Coxhead, 2000) analysed lots of different academic texts across lots of different academic subject areas (e.g. Medicine, Law, Economics, English Literature, Chemistry, History, etc.). This analysis was used to create a list of words that are common in all different academic subject areas. The result was the creation of the Academic Word List (AWL), which is a list of 570 word families (e.g. analyst, analyse, analysis, analytic, etc. all count as one word family). You can find a list of these word families here: https://www.eapfoundation.com/vocab/academic/awllists/

    Some of these words, you will already know and some of them will be new to you. Apart from looking at the list above, there are a couple of ways that we can check whether a word appears on the Academic Word List (AWL). The first way is by checking in the Longman dictionary. When we search for a word in this dictionary, it will tell us if a word appears on the Academic Word List by indicating ‘AWL’ in a yellow box. If we can see this yellow ‘AWL’ box, this indicates that the word appears on the Academic Word List, and is therefore quite a useful word to learn, e.g. see below for ‘analyse’:

    Taken from the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (https://www.ldoceonline.com/)

    This is probably the best way to check any new words that you might see in your textbook or any texts printed on paper or in a book. However, if you are reading an online text, it can be better to use the AWL highlighter, which will highlight any words from the AWL when you copy the text into the box on the following page: https://www.eapfoundation.com/vocab/academic/highlighter/

    Taken from: https://www.eapfoundation.com/vocab/academic/highlighter/

    Using the first paragraph from this blog post as an example, you can see below that several words have been highlighted. You will notice that some are coloured grey and some are coloured orange:

    Taken from: https://www.eapfoundation.com/vocab/academic/highlighter/

    If you look on the sidebar on the left, you can see that these colours relate to different ‘levels’. These levels (1-10) are organised by frequency. In other words, level 1 has the most frequent academic words and level 10 has the least frequent academic words.

    Taken from: https://www.eapfoundation.com/vocab/academic/highlighter/

    Now obviously, it would be nice to know all of these words on the Academic Word List, but there are a lot to learn, so that could be quite a big task. It is therefore better to focus your vocabulary learning on the most useful words from the list, i.e. levels 1, 2, 3, etc. rather than say levels 9 and 10. However, where you start learning on the list will depend on how many words you already know from the list (most learners will probably already know quite a lot of words from level 1).

    When using this tool, you can change the colours for each level to help you identify the words from the levels that you want to focus on.

    Before finishing, I should mention that the Academic Word List is not the only list of academic words, but it is probably the most well-known. If you are interested in other lists of academic words, you might want to read this journal article (Therova, 2020). One of the lists mentioned in the article is from Oxford Dictionaries called the Oxford Phrasal Academic Lexicon (OPAL), which has more words than the Academic Word List and also divides words into spoken and written academic words. It also has different sublists, thus allowing you to target your vocabulary learning.

    In a later blog post, I will show you some apps that you can use to help you learn the words from the Academic Word List. However, in the next blog post, I will show some tools that help to focus your vocabulary learning on ‘general’ vocabulary.

    References

    Coxhead, A. (2000). A New Academic Word List. TESOL quarterly, 34(2), pp213-238.

    Therova, D. (2020). Review of Academic Word Lists. TESL-EJ, 24(1). Available at: https://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume24/ej93/ej93a5/

    West, M. (1953). A General Service List of English Words. London: Longman, Green and Co.