How much input do you need to learn the most frequent 9,000 words?

By Paul Nation. Reading in a Foreign Language, 2014

107 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study looks at how much input is needed to gain enough repetition of the 1st 9,000 words of English for learning to occur. It uses corpora of various sizes and composition to see how many tokens of input would be needed to gain at least twelve repetitions and to meet most of the words at eight of the nine 1000 word family levels. Corpus sizes of just under 200,000 tokens and 3 million tokens provide an average of at least 12 repetitions at the 2nd 1,000 word level and the 9th 1,000 word level respectively. In terms of novels, this equates to two to twenty-five novels (at 120,000 tokens per novel). Allowing for learning rates of around 1,000 word families a year, these are manageable amounts of input. Freely available "Mid-frequency Readers" have been created to provide the suitable kind of input needed.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6aa4fdaee3bd67274ac635bb4342d73549665142

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

1. N. Schmitt
2. Stuart Webb
3. A. Chang
4. E. Peters
5. Paul Nation
6. Diane Schmitt
7. T. Cobb
8. Marlise Horst

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

1. Stuart Webb
2. N. Schmitt
3. A. Chang
4. E. Peters
5. Paul Nation
6. A. Pellicer‐Sánchez
7. Diane Schmitt
8. Lars Stenius Stæhr

In Language and Linguistics

1. Stuart Webb
2. N. Schmitt
3. A. Chang
4. E. Peters
5. Paul Nation
6. Diane Schmitt
7. A. Pellicer‐Sánchez
8. T. Cobb

Citations in the corpus

• Principles guiding vocabulary learning through extensive reading (2015, background): “As proficiency develops, reasonably large quantities of input are needed to meet most of the words at a particular 1000 word level, and to meet them enough times for learning to have a chance to occur (Nation, 2014).”
• How much vocabulary is needed to use English? Replication of van Zeeland & Schmitt (2012), Nation (2006) and Cobb (2007) (2015, background): “When completed, these 50 texts will form a corpus that will be eminently suitable for a combined corpus and empirical replication of Cobb (2007) or indeed of Nation (2014).”
• Second language vocabulary learning through extensive reading with audio support: How do frequency and distribution of occurrence affect learning? (2015, background): “However, this has recently been rectified with the development of mid-frequency adapted novels (Nation, 2014).”
• HOW DOES PRIOR WORD KNOWLEDGE AFFECT VOCABULARY LEARNING PROGRESS IN AN EXTENSIVE READING PROGRAM? (2015, background): “This may have the added bonus of allowing those at the upper levels to move beyond graded readers to the midfrequency readers that have recently become available (Nation, 2014 ).”