A reassessment of frequency and vocabulary size in L2 vocabulary teaching

The importance of frequency as a principle for organizing language learning, while long promoted in principle (Palmer, 1941; West, 1953), has recently become feasible in practice with three new developments: theoretical support from acquisition theorists (Ellis, 2002); the assembly of truly enormous, repre-sentative and accessible language corpora (Davies, 2011; Leech, Rayson & Wilson, 2001); and the extraction of pedagogically relevant lexical information (Nation, 2006) and grammatical information (Biber et al., 1999) from them. Since about 1990, this frequency information has regularly been deployed in the development of language courses and learning resources, particularly lexical resources such as dictionaries and tutorial computer programs for learning vocabulary. Now, however, at least in the area of lexis, the frequency approach must face two consequences of its own success: larger corpora and stronger tools of analysis have revealed not just useful ranked lists of word forms, but (1) the extent of homonymy and homography hidden within them, and (2) the extent of multiword units with meanings independent of their component words. The present paper makes the case for including both types of information in peda-gogically oriented frequency lists. It shows firstly why this should be done, then reviews some new research that is making it possible, and finally develops and pilot-tests a way of doing it. The underlying theme is that the technologies that raised the problems of homoforms and multiword units can also be used to solve them. 1.

Once seen as a neglected area, second language vocabulary research has come into its own in recent years. But classroom implementations have been slow to follow. One potentially very useful research finding is the impressive coverage power of a relatively small number of words: analyses of large corpora of language show that with knowledge of the 2,000 most frequent word families of a language, learners will be familiar with around 80 % of the words they encounter. This position paper argues for refocusing language pedagogy to improve learners ’ opportunities to acquire knowledge of these important words. The rationale is based on empirical studies showing how knowledge of vocabulary generally and 2,000 high frequency families in particular impact proficiency. Research also shows that “normal ” classroom input does not support the acquisition of the words learners most need to know.