A reassessment of frequency and vocabulary size in L2 vocabulary teaching1

By N. Schmitt, Diane Schmitt. Language Teaching, 2012

369 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The high-frequency vocabulary of English has traditionally been thought to consist of the 2,000 most frequent word families, and low-frequency vocabulary as that beyond the 10,000 frequency level. This paper argues that these boundaries should be reassessed on pedagogic grounds. Based on a number of perspectives (including frequency and acquisition studies, the amount of vocabulary necessary for English usage, the range of graded readers, and dictionary defining vocabulary), we argue that high-frequency English vocabulary should include the most frequent 3,000 word families. We also propose that the low-frequency vocabulary boundary should be lowered to the 9,000 level, on the basis that 8–9,000 word families are sufficient to provide the lexical resources necessary to be able to read a wide range of authentic texts (Nation 2006). We label the vocabulary between high-frequency (3,000) and low-frequency (9,000+) as mid-frequency vocabulary. We illustrate the necessity of mid-frequency vocabulary for proficient language use, and make some initial suggestions for research addressing the pedagogical challenge raised by mid-frequency vocabulary.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b032abfe15a34dbd444d3b8ae5cc478033c0958e

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. Paul Nation
3. Diane Schmitt
4. Marijana Macis
5. T. Cobb
6. Marlise Horst
7. Stuart Webb
8. E. Peters

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

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

In Language and Linguistics

1. N. Schmitt
2. Paul Nation
3. Marijana Macis
4. Diane Schmitt
5. T. Cobb
6. Stuart Webb
7. E. Peters
8. F. Boers

Citations in the corpus

• How much vocabulary is needed to use English? Replication of van Zeeland & Schmitt (2012), Nation (2006) and Cobb (2007) (2015, background): “…a complete set of graded readers that specifically target ‘mid-frequency’ vocabulary (that of the third to eighth 1,000 levels, as defined by Schmitt & Schmitt 2014), such that significant numbers of word families in target k-level zones are met frequently, and mainly in environments of…”
• Understanding vocabulary acquisition, instruction, and assessment: A research agenda (2019, background): “This can lead to quite haphazard vocabulary selection (Schmitt & Schmitt, 2014).”
• Not just ‘small potatoes’: Knowledge of the idiomatic meanings of collocations (2017, background): “The input from instructed EFL environments may not relate strongly to corpus frequency simply because vocabulary selection tends to be relatively unprincipled and opportunistic in both written materials (Schmitt & Schmitt, 2014) and teacher talk (Horst, 2010).”
• How much input do you need to learn the most frequent 9,000 words? (2014, background): “Schmitt and Schmitt (2012) also suggested applying the term mid-frequency vocabulary to the 6,000 word families making up the 4 th 1000 to 9 th”