A Comparative Study of Word Frequency and Text Coverage between English and Chinese for College English Vocabulary Acquisition

Abstract

This comparative study is based on the English and Chinese corpora of more than one million tokens collected by the author in person and finds that English enjoys a large vocabulary but relatively a far low word frequency and text coverage, compared with Chinese. In the English corpus of more than one million tokens, nearly eighty percent types appear fewer than ten times, and the number of the types with the frequency above ten times is too small to reach the 95% text coverage, which is generally seen as the least required for reading comprehension. Then, this paper infers that, for College English learners in China, if they follow the approach of incidental vocabulary acquisition to pick up their new words from reading, they will have to add up their reading outside classroom to a quantity of more than 660,000 words, eleven times as much as the reading in class. That is to say, they will have to read 800 more texts with 800 words each after class, or have to read another ten texts in their free time after they finish learning one text in class. Undoubtedly, this is a reading load too heavy for them to bear, and reveals that the approach of incidental vocabulary acquisition is not feasible for College English teaching and learning.