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).






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







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.







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







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