Potentials of English Children’s Literature Books for Extensive Reading with a Focus on Vocabulary Size and Word Repetition

Abstract

The primary purpose of the current study is to explore the potentials of children’s literature books for extensive reading by measuring the vocabulary size necessary for comprehension and estimating the number of words that could be learned incidentally through reading the books. For the analysis, the texts of 218 books in the ten popular English children’s book series in Korea were compiled and analyzed utilizing the Range, one of the comprehensive vocabulary analysis tools. The results revealed that about 3,000 word families were necessary for 95% lexical text coverage of the books and 6,000 word families for 98% lexical text coverage in general, although the vocabulary size necessary for the text coverage largely vary according to the book series. It was also found that readers may be able to learn about 776 word families incidentally through reading the books extensively, assuming that they know about 6,000 word families which can lead to 98% lexical coverage of the texts.