What is the NGSL?
First off, what are high-frequency words?
A high-frequency word is a word that children and adults will come across “most frequently” in reading or speaking.
It is one of many common words that make up the majority of English.
Let’s put it all into context.
Depending on what your definition of a word is, the English language is made up of 1,000,00 words. (Stanford Research Group)
Or 350,000 in the Oxford English dictionary, but this doesn’t include words with distinct meaning which raises that number significantly.
According to Nation and Waring (1997), a university educated native speaker knows about 20,000 words.
Now THAT is a pretty daunting mission to throw at a beginner level student.
Okay class… you need to learn 20,000 words. Here’s the list…
Let’s see…
365 days in a year x 5 words per day …
EVERY DAY…
5 WORDS…
For more than 10 years …
= STILL one year away from knowing 20,000!!!
That would almost bring a non-native speaker up to par with a university educated native speaker’s vocabulary level.
Learning 5 words per day for 11 years. WOW!
How many words should my students know?
The cool thing is that students DON’T need to know all of those words to understand everyday English.
According to Robert Hillerich, “just 3 words, I, and, the account for nearly ten percent of all words printed in English”
According to Paul Nation with 2000 words, we can understand about 90% of general English.1
According to Dr. Charles Browne, with 2800 words, you can understand 92% of general English.
Also, according to Dr. Browne, we can actually understand about 90% of spoken English with just 721 words.2
By “general English” I mean,
– Newspapers
– TV shows
– Magazine articles
– Everyday conversations
Now when browsing our lists, you will notice that some of your favorite words (think food) are not included in the high frequency lists.
This is because they are not all that useful when it comes to general English (proper nouns that is). This isn’t to say you shouldn’t teach them or encourage your students to learn them.
Simply put… you should.
You should encourage them to expand upon the lists with what they are interested in, like, prefer and are passionate about.
And fear not … though not included in the NGSL lists they are included in our flashcard library.
To learn English faster and more efficiently, students should focus on memorizing the most common vocabulary first. Learning words such as elephant, sports jacket and… are often the go to for English teachers, but not always the right choice.
Learning vocabulary by simply memorizing the definition is an ineffective way to learn words. Reading, listening and speaking will help students to use vocabulary in the right situations. That’s often where rote learning leads them astray.
Knowing a word is one thing.
Using it correctly and most importantly remembering it, is another.
1. David Hirsh and Paul Nation, What Vocabulary Size is Needed to Read Unsimplified Texts for Pleasure?, Reading in a Foreign Language, 8(2), 1992
