Learning Vocabulary Webinar

DR. Charles Browne

English Central Webinar Series

Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition, Word Lists & Online Learning Tools

Dr. Charles Browne, Professor of TESOL & Applied LinguisticsDirector, EFL Teacher Education ProgramMeiji Gakuin University; Tokyo, Japanbrowne@ltr.meijigakuin.ac.jp

A few of my many online vocabulary learning projects…

Outline of Presentation(s):

Why focus on Vocabulary?

A quick introduction to corpus linguistics and associated online tools

Introduction to several important word lists

Introduce online tools related to identifying, analyzing and teaching important vocabulary words

Introducing sites that do graded reading and listening in a way that also considers the teaching of vocabulary

Why Focus on Vocabulary?

The seminal work in vocabulary instruction…

(2000, Cambridge University Press)

(1990, Heinle & Heinle)

The largest dictionary of English (the Oxford English Dictionary) contains over 600,000 word families…

the

and

of

123

600,000

The average college-educated native speaker of English only knows about 20,000 of these words….

1

600,000

580,000 unknown words!

20,000

The number of words we need is actually much less…

20,000

Knowledge of just the first 5000 most frequent words of English gives an astonishing 95% coverage of all books, magazines and newspapers…

5,000

20,000

600,000

Average Native Speaker Vocabulary

95% is minimum threshold for comprehension…

Problem 1: most EFL Learners know far fewer than 5000 words…

Country Vocab. Size

Hours of Instruction

Reference

Japan (University) 2000-2200 800-1200 Shillaw (95), Barrow (99)

Indonesia (University) 1220 900 Nurweni & Read (99)

Oman (University) 2000 1350 Hort et al (98)

Israel (HS graduates) 3500 1500 Laufer (98)

France (HS students) 1000 400 Arnaud et al (85)

Greece (age 15, HS) 1680 660 Milton & Meara (98)

Germany (age 15, HS) 1200 400 Milton & Meara (98)

11123

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Frequency

600,000

5,000

Problem 2: Studying the wrong words…

chaos

permission

andof

the

exasperate

digress

chaos

permission

andof

the

abstain

emigrate

torment

The Negative Effect of “Test English” in Japan…

PROBLEM: Students NEED to learn the first 5000 words of English to use English in the real word…

But entrance exams and school textbooks force students to memorize hundreds of low-frequency words…

RESULT? Students can’t deal with real world English because they don’t know hundreds of the most important high frequency words…

The same appears to be true for learners from countries all over the world…

sum

bid

ace

HFW2,289

2,566

4,441

14,641

23,371

25,537

42,024

84,168

Solution: Use the science of corpus linguistics to create short lists of words that give learners the maximum amount of coverage…

The NGSL’s 2800 words give an amazing 90% coverage!www.newgeneralservicelist.org

OK, so what’s a Corpus?

A more precise definition…

A corpus can be defined as a collection of texts assumed to be representative of a given language put together so that it can be used for linguistic analysis. Usually the assumption is that the language stored in a corpus is naturally-occurring, that is gathered according to explicit design criteria, with a specific purpose in mind, and with a claim to represent natural chunks of language selected according to specific typology.

Tognini-Bonelli (2001:2)

And a less precise one…

A corpus is basically just a huge bunch of texts….

Types of Corpora:

Written vs. Spoken

General vs. Specialized

e.g. ESP, Learner corpora

Monolingual vs. Multilingual

Annotated vs. Unannotated

Synchronic vs. Diachronic

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One Problem with Corpus and Vocabulary List Development:

WYPIIWYGO (????)

A few current Corpus Projects…

1. Business English Word List for NHK TV Show in Japan

2. EnglishCentral (a HUGE video corpus of authentic English)

3. New General Service List (using Cambridge International Corpus)

4. New Academic Word List (using Cambridge International Corpus)

5. TOEIC Vocabulary Study List (using past tests and prep books)

A New General Service Listwww.newgeneralservicelist.org

Basic Corpus Analysis Tools

A Corpus: a systematic collection of speech or writing that is built according to explicit design criteria for a specific purpose

A Concordancer Tool: search engine (e.g. Tom Cobb’s Concordancer or Laurence Anthony’s tools such as AntConc)

A Concordance: occurrences of search item, displayed in list with immediate context shown

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OK, so what’s a concordance look like?

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So how can we use a concordance in the classroom?

www.lextutor.ca/concordancers/

EnglishCentral.com’s Cool Video Concordancer

A typical readout from a Concordancer

Select any word from any video and instantly get multiple contextualized examples of the word in use in authentic videos…

Another Cool Corpus Tool:Tom Cobb’s Keyword Extractorhttp://www.lextutor.ca/

Key Words identified for Dracula…

How about Word Clouds?

www.wordle.net

Free Graded Text Editor & Analysis Tool www.er-central.com/ogte/

Google’s N-Gram ToolTV vs. Radio vs. Magazine vs. Cell Phoneover the past 150 years…

IMPORTANT VOCABULARY LISTS FOR 2ND LANGAUGE LEARNERS

• British National Corpus BNC• Sight Words (Dolche, 1948)• GSL (West, 1953) • AWL (Coxhead, 2000)• New GSL (Browne, Culligan & Phillips, 2013)• New ASL (Browne, Culligan & Phillips, 2013)• 100 Most Frequent Idioms (based on MICASE Corpus)• The Oxford 3000 Word List

Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition, Word Lists & Online Learning Tools

Thank you!

Dr. Charles Browne, Professor of TESOL & Applied LinguisticsDirector, EFL Teacher Education ProgramMeiji Gakuin University; Tokyo, Japanbrowne@ltr.meijigakuin.ac.jp