high frequency vocabulary

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High Frequency Vocabulary 

 

What things do you consider when planning a lesson or course? How useful is

 

the vocabulary you’re teaching?

 

Did you know that your students can understand 90% of English with less

 

than 12% of the average native speaker’s total vocabulary?

 

There are over 600,000 words in the English language (of course this differs

 

like everything according to which dictionary or other source you refer to)

 

That’s pretty much impossible for anybody to learn.

 

Of course, almost nobody knows all 600,000 words.

 

So, how many words do you think the average university educated

 

English speaker knows?

 

About 20,000.

 

However, in order to understand 92% of English on TV, in movies, magazines,

 

online, in books and newspapers you only need to know the top 2800.

 

Who in their right mind figured this out?

 

Well … a guy named Charlie Browne … Actually …Dr. Charlie Browne led some

 

research (you can learn more and download all of the lists yourself using the

 

links below).

 

He based it off of about 273 million words taken from a variety of British and

 

American sources.

 

They discovered that 2800 words would give you 92% coverage of general

 

English (this is known as Zipf’s Law)

 

 

Basically, Zipf’s Law states that some words are used much more frequently

 

than others.

 

 

And that the most frequent words make up a larger percentage of everything

 

we read, watch, listen to and hear.

 

 

So we often use the same words over and over again.

 

 

So what exactly is the NGSL word list?

 

The NGSL is a list of 2800 of the most frequently used words in everyday

 

English.

 

The list does not include proper nouns, numbers and dates.

 

 

The NGSL is ordered according to frequency. In other words, how often the

 

word is used throughout the English language.

 

 

This can be quite challenging for ESL and EFL students as is.

 

 

It’s a powerful tool, however we caution it should be used with thought and

 

planning.

 

Let’s look at some examples of why you need to order the words according to

 

your needs, student levels, interests, course goals, etc.

 

 

Words such as political, process and policy are all in the top 400 words.

 

 

Other words such as telephone, weather and cook are not as frequent. These

 

words are listed after the top 1000.

 

 

For beginner and low intermediate students, we don’t recommend assigning

 

vocabulary based on frequency. This is putting the cart before the horse so to

 

speak.

 

A group of experienced ESL-EFL teachers have re-ordered the NGSL wordlist

 

to make it friendlier for lower level students. We refer to it as PESL and is

 

simply the NGSL reordered to be more ESL friendly for beginner students.

 

 

This is just one example of how we are a simple and practical approach to

 

teaching and learning English.

 

Learn more about the NGSL, NGSL-s and research involving his high frequency word lists: http://www.newgeneralservicelist.org/

vocabORgrammar

Which do you focus on more in class?

 

This is always an interesting question and one that we as teachers will

inevitably always debate. The truth is that they are both very important.

 

There really is no clear cut answer for one or the other, but most teachers

push one more than the other.

 

That together with depending on which country you live and teach, the school

system will push one over the other.

 

As native speakers, we don’t typically study grammar patterns of our native

tongue. At least I can’t ever remember studying them in school.

 

Instead we learn first from hearing and repeating. We try to copy our parents

or siblings.

 

Then pointing and repeating. We want something, we go for it.

 

Then being read to or reading, singing and playing.

 

Speaking and short conversations. Practice, practice and more practice.

 

And on and on.

 

So as a result of the above… we believe that vocabulary is key to learning a

language. We think that it’s the foundation for which we communicate.

 

Putting the words in the right order (structure) will come with listening

practice, reading, and speaking in a variety of situations. Practice, practice and

more practice.

 

It really isn’t just that simple though.

 

Why is it more than just words?

 

English isn’t just a bunch of words or words that are structured in a way that

are meaningful.

 

Collocations, idioms and chunks are equally important. The higher the level of

the speaker, the more of these we see.

Many words in sentences when taken out of context make no sense at all.

 

English really isn’t a piece of cake (this idiom would make no sense at all to an

EFL-ESL student)

 

It’s raining like cats and dogs (your students would be lost if they looked up

each of these and tried to make meaning of this idiom)

 

Words have multiple meanings. Depending on the intonation or rhythm we

use, they can mean something completely different.

 

Let me stop there before I completely go off on another tangent.

 

There’s a lot to learning a language. Students need to start somewhere, and I

think that somewhere is vocabulary.

 

Words

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

2. http://www.newgeneralservicelist.org/