What Matters in Learning Vocabulary

Cambridge English Teacher © Cambridge University Press and Cambridge English Language Assessment 2014

What Matters in Learning Vocabulary?

Learning vocabulary is seen as being central to language learning, and one of the most common complaints that learners make is that they don't know enough words. This article describes the most important things that teachers and learners need to give attention to when considering vocabulary learning. We will do this by answering two questions – What vocabulary needs to be learnt? How is vocabulary best learnt? What vocabulary needs to be learnt? Native speakers of English know thousands of words, but these words are not all equally valuable. The ten most frequent words of English cover 25% of the words on any page or in any conversation. The 1000 most frequent words of English cover around 75%. In order to learn vocabulary effectively, it is important to learn the most useful words first and to avoid spending time on less useful words, unless there is some especially strong reason for learning some of them. Researchers on vocabulary divide words into three major groups – high-frequency words, mid-frequency words and low-frequency words (Schmitt & Schmitt, 2012). There are about 3000 high-frequency words in English. If learners know these words, and can deal with proper nouns, then around 95% of the words on any page or in any conversation will be familiar to them. A native speaker of English learns at the rate of around 1000 words each year up to the age of twenty or so. Foreign language learners would need to work very hard to match this rate of learning, but if they did, they would need to spend two or three years learning these high-frequency words. The high-frequency words include the most useful vocabulary that all learners have to learn. It is not difficult to find lists of the high-frequency words on the Internet – just search for General Service List. There are around 6000 mid-frequency words, and tens of thousands of low-frequency words. How is vocabulary best learnt? Successful learning of vocabulary depends on two things: firstly, on the kind of attention that is given to words that are unknown or only partly known and secondly, on the number of times these words are met. Improving vocabulary learning depends on giving appropriate amounts of deliberate attention to words, and having plenty of opportunities for the learners to meet the words they need to learn again and again. By far, the best way of getting plenty of repetitions of the high-frequency words is to do a lot of graded reading. Graded readers are books written within specially controlled vocabulary levels, and the award-winning Cambridge English Readers have six levels covering the high-frequency words of English. Ideally, learners should be reading for at least one hour a week for 40 weeks of the year to have a chance of meeting the high-frequency words enough times to learn about a thousand a year. Setting up an extensive reading programme using graded readers is the most effective improvement any teacher could make to an English course. There are plenty of free guides available on how to set up an extensive reading program (http://erfoundation.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/ERF_Guide.pdf).


Vocabulary learning during graded reading is largely ‘incidental’ learning – the learners pick up the vocabulary while giving most of their attention to the story they are reading. Extensive reading sets up very good conditions for vocabulary learning, because in graded readers the high-frequency words are repeated often and there are very few unknown words that are not currently worth learning. For learners who already know the high-frequency words of English, there are now free graded readers that support the learning of the mid-frequency words of English. They are available in electronic form and consist of well-known books that are now out of copyright and have been adapted by replacing a large number of the low-frequency words with high-frequency and mid-frequency words. To find these on the Internet, search for mid-frequency readers. Vocabulary learning is greatly increased if incidental learning through reading and listening is also accompanied by ‘deliberate’ learning. The best deliberate learning technique for learners of English as a foreign language, and for those doing intensive study of English in an English-speaking country, is learning from word cards. Word cards are small cards which have the English word or phrase to be learnt on one side and the translation of the word or phrase into the first language on the other side. Learners carry packs of these cards around with them, and when they have a free moment they quickly go through the cards trying to recall the meanings of the words. Nowadays, there are many very efficient flash card programs which can be used for such learning on smartphones or tablets. Some teachers are horrified by the recommendation that learners should use word cards. They believe that all vocabulary should be learnt in context and that deliberate learning like this does not last. Both of these beliefs are not correct and go against the findings of research. As long as there is also plenty of opportunity to learn through language use activities like extensive reading and extensive listening, learning from word cards or flash card programs is highly effective and highly efficient. Learners need a little bit of training in how to do word card learning (see Nation, 2013: Chapter 11), but once they are good at using this strategy they can become very independent vocabulary learners. There are other effective ways of doing deliberate vocabulary learning. These include looking up words in dictionaries while reading, learning a rather small number of very useful word parts such as high-frequency prefixes and word stems, and doing vocabulary activities. Measuring vocabulary size Teachers should know how many words their learners know, and learners should know their vocabulary sizes, because this can help them when choosing books for extensive reading, and when deciding the kinds of words they should be focusing on in their deliberate learning. A very useful website for measuring vocabulary size can be found at www.my.vocabularysize.com. There are also hard-copy vocabulary size tests available at http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/staff/paul-nation.aspx.


Teachers and vocabulary learning Vocabulary teaching is the least important of the vocabulary teacher's jobs. It is still important, but not as important as: (1) planning a well-designed vocabulary course so that there is a mixture of incidental and deliberate learning, and so that the learners are focusing on the most useful vocabulary for them at their present stage of learning; (2) training learners in the use of vocabulary learning strategies such as guessing from context, doing deliberate learning using word cards, using the word parts strategy, and using dictionaries to help vocabulary learning; (3) testing learners to see where they are in their vocabulary knowledge. Teachers should teach vocabulary, particularly when useful words come up during classroom activities and during intensive reading. However, vocabulary teaching is rather inefficient as it takes quite a bit of time, and a teacher is lucky if 50% of the words that are taught are actually retained by the learners. To make vocabulary teaching more efficient, teachers should have a general plan of the words they want to teach and should provide plenty of opportunities for repetitions of these words. References Publications Nation, I. S. P. (2013). Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. Second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schmitt, N., & Schmitt, D. (2012). A reassessment of frequency and vocabulary size in L2 vocabulary teaching. Language Teaching, available from http:journals.cambridge.org Web http://my.vocabularysize.com/ http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/staff/paul-nation.aspx

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What Matters in Learning Vocabulary