Vocabulary Load Research Articles

TED Talks and the Textbook: An In-Depth Lexical Analysis

The development of TED Talks textbooks has been a welcoming addition to English for Academic Purposes (EAP) pedagogy. The textbooks offer educators and learners a suitable framework for practicing all four of the language skills (i.e., listening, reading, speaking, and writing). However, the use of TED Talk resources could create specific vocabulary challenges for learners as they progress through each unit in the textbook. Research suggests that although textbook frameworks encompassing listening resources benefit learners with a familiar lesson approach, the varying vocabulary load and the presence of academic vocabulary and multiword units (MWUs) presented between the chosen resources and the textbook itself could lead to comprehension difficulties for learners. This study investigates the vocabulary of 12 TED Talks included in the commercial textbook Keynote 2 to understand the lexical profile, vocabulary load, and the academic and multiword unit coverage for each of the chosen listening texts. The results showed that the TED Talks selections and the textbook provided inadequate vocabulary practice, limited academic vocabulary exposure, and a lack of item repetition for learners. The study suggests the inclusion of ideal supplementary materials and appropriate TED Talk selections to help provide educators with suitable guidance to support their learners’ varying vocabulary knowledge.

From Needs Analysis to the Establishment of a University Vocabulary List for English Majors

This paper concerns the academic vocabulary needs of undergraduate English majors in a tertiary context in Azerbaijan. Based on the results of the previous studies, it is suggested that developing an appropriate course material to meet the specific learning needs of these students will be beneficial for them. Thus, this study aims to identify the percentage of the running words and high-frequency word families beyond the 2,000 most-frequent words in the university textbook corpus to help the students to attain 98% lexical coverage. To address English majors’ scant academic vocabulary knowledge, a University Vocabulary List has been created. First, a university textbook corpus comprising the words used in 11 subject-specific course textbooks across subject areas taught at Azerbaijan University of Languages was compiled. Next, the range and frequency distribution of the words beyond the British National Corpus scale 2,000-word families was examined. Finally, the 396 most frequently occurring word families in the corpus were chosen; these formed the proposed University Vocabulary List for English majors, accounting for a 6.96% lexical coverage. The University Vocabulary List for English majors and the British National Corpus 2,000 high-frequency word families, including proper nouns, provide a text coverage of 97.28%, which is only marginally lower than the suggested lexical threshold of 98% suggested by Laufer and Ravenhorst-Kalovski (2010) and Nation (2006). It is, therefore, argued that the University Vocabulary List represents a sufficiently frequent and relevant vocabulary load for English majors whose secondary educational background and first-year general English textbooks have not equipped them for the linguistic challenges they face at the initial stages of their tertiary education. The article concludes by stating the pedagogical implications for developing these learners’ knowledge and use of the most frequent word families.

Vocabulary in digital science resources for middle school learners

This corpus-based study examined the vocabulary in a 2.7 million token corpus composed of digital science resources for middle school (6–8 grade) students in the United States. The findings of this study showed that to reach the suggested 95%–98% lexical coverage thresholds of the Digital Science Corpus (DSC) that are conventionally deemed to facilitate minimal and optimal reading comprehension (Laufer, 2020), middle school (MS) students grade 6–8 must recognize the first 6,000, respectively 14,000 most frequent BNC/COCA (Nation, 2012) word families plus proper nouns and marginal nouns. The results of the lexical analysis across the three sub-corpora in the DSC suggest that the Life Science sub-corpora has a considerably larger vocabulary load than the Physical Science and Earth and Space Science sub-corpora. Additionally, while 98.60% of the most frequent 1,000 BNC/COCA word families occurred at least six times in the DSC, the 2,000–7,000 BNC/COCA word families provided significantly fewer opportunities for repeated occurrence. Since more than half of the words in the 5,000–7,000 BNC/COCA bands occurred five times or less in the overall corpus, most words across these bands do not have high enough frequency in the digital science resources to allow MS students to learn them incidentally from reading the texts found in digital science resources. Several pedagogically relevant suggestions are discussed.

Vocabulary Coverage in a High School Vietnamese EFL Textbook: A Corpus-based Preliminary Investigation

In the context of English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching, textbooks play a crucial role in the classroom as the primary source of lexical input for learners. Thus, it is essential that textbooks can sufficiently facilitate learners in their overall comprehension and vocabulary learning, especially with the most frequent words in English. The study examined the vocabulary load of a locally-published EFL textbook in Vietnam for high school students focusing on the vocabulary coverage in relation to the 95% and 98% thresholds for text comprehension and the coverage of high-frequency word families in the textbook. To fulfil these objectives, a frequency-based analysis of word families using the Vocabprofilers on the https://www.lextutor.ca/ website was conducted with the 41,137-word textbook corpus. It is revealed that students need to have a vocabulary size of 3,000 and 5,000-word families to reach the coverage of 95% and 98% of the whole textbook, which would be too challenging for Vietnamese high school students. Moreover, the textbook was found not to represent the second 1,000-word list very well with the appearance of just over half of the second most frequent 1,000-word families. These findings highlight the role of teachers in adapting the textbook for more effective vocabulary learning and general comprehension of the materials.

Vocabulary in academic lectures

Vocabulary is essential for comprehending lectures in university courses. No studies have explicitly compared vocabulary in lectures from different contexts. In this study, three corpora were developed from university lectures in EMI courses, non-EMI courses, and open access EMI courses. Analysis of the vocabulary load showed that lectures in non-EMI courses were more lexically demanding than open access EMI courses, which were more lexically demanding than EMI courses. Analysis of the coverage of Dang et al.’s (2017) Academic Spoken Word List (ASWL) showed that compared to general words, learning ASWL words is a shortcut for learners to improve their lecture comprehension. Moreover, while knowledge of items from all ASWL levels could benefit learners from the three contexts, attention to Levels 1–3 items would probably be more beneficial for those studying in EMI courses and open access EMI courses. Attention to Level 4 items appeared to be more useful for those studying in non-EMI courses.

Vocabulary in EAP learning materials: What can we learn from teachers, learners, and corpora?

Despite the role of teachers and learners in vocabulary learning and teaching, no studies have combined the information from these sources with that from corpora to examine vocabulary in EAP learning materials for learners in EFL contexts. This study employed a mixed-method approach which combined corpus, learners, and teachers to investigate vocabulary in all core materials in an EAP course for postgraduates in China. First, the vocabulary levels of 537 students in this course were measured. Then, the vocabulary in the course learning materials was analyzed with RANGE (Heatley et al., 2002). Finally, semi-structured interviews were conducted with six teachers teaching in the EAP course. As a whole the learners had mastered only the most frequent 1000 words. However, to achieve reasonable comprehension of their learning materials, they would need to know the most frequent 4000 words. Interviews with teachers also revealed that vocabulary in the materials appeared to be difficult for learners. One possible reason for the heavy vocabulary load of the learning materials was the insufficient attention to vocabulary in the design of these materials, which was in turn due to either the lack of knowledge or insufficient knowledge of research-based principles on vocabulary instruction.

Technical single and multiword unit vocabulary in spoken rugby discourse

Rugby union is played by first and second language speakers of English in many countries. Rugby has its own technical vocabulary (e.g., ruck, inside pass) and its knowledge is crucial for joining the rugby community. This article reports on a study into the nature and knowledge of technical vocabulary in spoken rugby discourse through identifying technical vocabulary and developing both single and multiword word lists. This study involved the creation of a spoken rugby corpus (61,295 running words) and a vocabulary load analysis using Nation's (2012) BNC/COCA frequency and supplementary lists. The results found learners need over 4,000 word families plus supplementary lists to reach 98% comprehension. The corpus analysis resulted in a list of 252 technical single words which covers over 12% of the spoken corpus. A pedagogically oriented multi-word unit list of 267 items was also created. A receptive knowledge task using a sample of the rugby lexis and general English words was administered to 77 (29 English L1; 48 L2 speakers of English) participants. The results highlighted differing levels of technical rugby vocabulary knowledge between first and second language speakers of English. This article concludes with implications for ESP rugby courses and suggestions for possible future research.

A comparison of textbook vocabulary load analysis

The popularity of using textbooks in second language programs in universities around the world continues to grow. Textbooks support teachers in their teaching by providing accessible materials and clear instruction. In addition, learners are guided by familiar lesson frameworks (e.g., beginning, middle, end) to guide their independent study (Swales, 1980). However, textbooks present many challenges. Learners’ difficulties include the range in lexical knowledge they must possess (Nation, 2006) and the different lexical and grammatical features that are found in written textbook registers (Biber et al., 1998). This study investigates and outlines the vocabulary load of two English for Academic Purpose textbooks, using the British National Corpus and Corpus of Contemporary American English (BNC/COCA) 25,000 (Nation, 2012) and JACET8000 (JACET, 2016) word lists. The results show that for each textbook, more lexical demands are needed for second language learners in the JACET8000 compared with the BNC/COCA 25,000 lists. Understanding the content in textbooks will inform of the vocabulary-level requirements needed when taught in tertiary-level programs. Using a general and a Japanese-specific word list to identify possible pedagogical priorities can help to determine textbook priorities for teachers that can be applied to teaching in the Japanese classroom.

Academic Vocabulary in Sport Tourism News: A Corpus-Based Study

The objectives of the research is to study and analyze Academic Word List (AWL), which appeared in the corpus of sport tourism news wordlists collected from international online news. The framework of this study was based on Coxhead’s (2000) 570- Academic Word List (AWL). A corpus of 112,623 running words taken from the international online news, against the AWL of 570 words by using the Concordance Program, AntWordProfiler, for comparing the vocabulary load of the corpus of sport tourism news and AWL. The data were analyzed and displayed as percentages and frequencies. The results revealed that words in the AWL covered 7.38 % of the total words in the corpus. Findings also revealed that some of the words found in the present study were not found in Coxhead’s AWL. This suggests that vocabulary needs of students in sport or tourism are characteristically different from those of students in other disciplines. The findings indicate the usefulness of AWL for sport learners and suggest the need to produce field-specific word lists embracing all frequent academic vocabulary items necessary for the expression of the rhetoric of the specific discipline. The Sport Tourism News wordlists can guide instructors to prepare the sport or tourism students in setting their vocabulary learning goals.

Investigating vocabulary coverage and load in an Indonesian EFL textbook series

This article reports a corpus-based study of a series of Indonesian EFL textbooks for senior high school students from grades 10to 12 (16-18 years old), published by the Indonesian government. The textbooks were collected from the Indonesian bookkeeping information system and transferred into ready-to-analyse corpora using Range Programme (Heathley et al., 2002) to know the vocabulary load and what words are available for learning. The most significant finding in this study showed that the textbooks require 3,000-4,000 word families to reach 95% coverage with some help needed to comprehend the textbooks and 5,000-6,000 word families to gain 98% coverage which means the students can cope independently to read the textbooks. The textbooks contain a large amount of high-frequency words with more than 80% and up to 7% of Indonesian words which play roles in learning objectives and pre-vocabulary teaching activities. The results of this study suggest the vocabulary features and implications for learning, present the pedagogical implications for teachers and textbook writers, and provide a springboard for future research.

КОЛОКАЦІЯ ЯК МІНІМАЛЬНА ОДИНИЦЯ ПОБУДОВИ СЛОВНИКОВОГО ЗАПАСУ В ПРОЦЕСІ ВИВЧЕННЯ АНГЛІЙСЬКОЇ МОВИ

This paper presents an academic research primarily focuses on defining collocation as a minimal unit in vocabulary acquisition building, on its importance for English Learners during English Learning Process and finally on its main role in practical usage of the English language. The main objectives were realized through various materials exploration of general English vocabulary acquisition building in Canadian English (CE), American English (AE), and British English (BE). The research area was original Canadian, American, and British informational sources with special emphasis on different scholars’ ideas as forEnglish spoken language and vocabulary load in written texts. The research highlighted the significance of collocations through their necessary and completely right usage in English Teaching and Learning Processes. The investigation made it possible to specify the definition of ’collocation’ and provide background information about collocations by gathering and analyzing Contemporary Linguistics scientists’ works and expressed their opinions. General scientific methods include deduction and induction, observation and generalization. Major linguistic methods employed in this paper are the structural (adefinitive and distributional analysis) and contrastive (based on three variants of English) ones. The methodology used for this academic research is simple being profound and scientifically approved. The notion of ’collocation’ refers to the frequent co-occurrence and mutual expectation of some words which appear more often than by chance. In this sense, collocation can be called ’a restricted combination’, which exists between a free combination and anidiom and has semantic transparency. The study of collocations was scanned through modern international researchers of CE / AE / BE. On having specified the definition of collocation and then shown the importance of collocations usage, we could finally provide some recommendations for the teaching and learning processes of collocations in order to improve and refresh modern English studies for students of linguistics / philology departments. These recommendations are as follows: teach / learn English via modern CE / AE / BE sources; emphasize on collocations structure and meaning during English Teaching and Learning vocabulary; pay a special attention to difference in similar collocations among various variants of English (for instance, as presented for CE / AE / BE in this paper);give preference to teaching / learning materials in native English; encourage students to read and listen to genuine CE / AE / BE written by native speakers; make use of online dictionaries, free corpora, and the Internet rich materials on a regular basis. Nowadays, there are many excellent dictionaries of CE / AE / BE collocations which are free and easy to be accessible. The prospects for further study may cover building of a digital dictionary of most frequent collocations in Canadian English, American English, and British English.

A Corpus-based Study of Vocabulary in the New Concept English Textbook Series

Growing a large vocabulary is one of the most important tasks of language learners and yet research reports on low levels of lexical knowledge for English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. In EFL contexts, textbooks are a vital source of exposure to English and the words that are worth learning. The New Concept English textbook series is widely used in China by large numbers of learners in secondary schools and cram schools, and in preparation for university studies. This study finds that while learners will encounter mostly high-frequency vocabulary in these books, they will need to know between 3000 and 6000 word families to cope with these texts, and Book 4 requires 1000 more word families than Book 3. Science-related texts in the books contribute to the vocabulary load because they contain a large proportion of low-frequency words used only once and have a higher vocabulary load than humanities texts. There are opportunities for learning mid-frequency vocabulary in these textbooks. Limitations of current research and suggestions for future research are also presented.

Narrow reading, vocabulary load and collocations in context: Exploring lexical repetition in concordances from a pedagogical perspective

AbstractNarrow reading has the potential to reduce vocabulary load and to provide rich opportunities for developing collocation knowledge, but these benefits rely on narrow reading increasing lexical repetition within a text. Hence, interest in narrow reading has been limited by the relatively small lexical effect of narrowing reading by topic (Nation, 2013). Nevertheless, research in data-driven learning and teaching and language corpora has reported positively on learners using concordances in a manner comparable to narrow reading. However, the potential for concordances to provide an increased lexical-repetition effect has not been assessed. This study bridges this gap by exploring the degree of lexical repetition available in concordances and identifies corpus composition as a key predictor of lexical repetition. The study uses standardised type-token ratio (sTTR) to analyse concordances extracted from corpora at three different levels of homogeneity/heterogeneity. The results show large, reliable variations in lexical repetition resulting from variation in corpus homogeneity/heterogeneity, and so identifies concordance-based narrow reading as a possible means of overcoming the limitations of traditional narrow reading by topic. The results are discussed with reference to pedagogical implications for language learners, teachers, and researchers.

Evaluating the Lexical Load of the Reading Comprehension Texts in EFL Textbooks

Research has revealed numerous problems regarding the teaching and learning of EFL in Morocco. One of these problems concerns students’ performance in reading comprehension tasks. Given the assumption that a large proportion of the problem can be attributed to lexical deficiency, this study sets out to evaluate the vocabulary load of the reading comprehension texts in EFL second-year baccalaureate textbooks. This was actualized through determining how much text coverage students could achieve with their vocabulary knowledge. To this end, a sample of 106 Moroccan bac2 (second-year baccalaureate) students was non-randomly sampled, and their vocabulary knowledge was assessed using an updated version of the Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT). In parallel, the vocabulary profiles of the reading texts in the three EFL textbooks were described using the Vocabulary Profiler software. Results have shown that students have a rather impoverished vocabulary knowledge of approximately 1317 word families, which have thus revealed a gap between their actual knowledge and the lexical load contained in their textbooks.

Receptive Vocabulary Knowledge and Reading Skills of Indonesian Prospective EFL Teachers

Since the introduction of Genre-Based Approach (GBA) in language teaching in Indonesia, teachers' reading skills play a much more critical role in the success of their job. However, judging from the vocabulary levels of English texts used in textbooks and examinations, they are now faced with serious obstacles. For this reason, this research sought to reveal (1) the student' teachers' vocabulary knowledge, (2) their skimming skill, (3) their scanning skill, (4) the correlation between students' vocabulary knowledge and scanning skill, and (5) the correlation between students' vocabulary knowledge and their skimming skill. The population of the research were students of the fifth semester at an English education department. It randomly took 53 (50%) out of 106 students of the semester. The data were obtained through two kinds of test namely Nations's Vocabulary Size Test 14000 and reading test. The results revealed that (1) the vocabulary knowledge of the average students was 2800 words, which indicated that they could only cover 86% of the running words in average texts, (2) the skimming score of the average students was 6.64 at the scoring range of 1 – 10, (3) the scanning score of the average students was 6.3, (4) there was no significant correlation between the vocabulary knowledge and the skimming skill of the students (the correlation coefficient of .182 is lower than r-table value of .279), and (5) there was a significant correlation between vocabulary knowledge and scanning skill (the correlation coefficient of .443 is higher than r-table value of .279). One of the most important findings here was that vocabulary knowledge influences scanning skill more than skimming skill. Consequently, this study offers a basis for consideration for policy makers as well as English teachers of the inclusion of vocabulary load in Indonesian English curriculum, the implementation of form-focused method in English classes, and more careful attention to vocabulary load when developing teaching materials.

How much vocabulary is needed to use a concordance?

Abstract Vocabulary load is a predictor of comprehension and a common concern in relation to learner use of concordances; however, vocabulary load figures for whole texts have limited relevance to learner use of concordances. This paper explores the average vocabulary load of the citations (or lines) in a concordance, reflecting how learners use concordances as reading or reference resources. Non-parametric tests are used to compare the vocabulary loads of citations from three authentic written corpora and a corpus of graded readers. The results indicate that citations from authentic corpora have an average vocabulary load of 4,000–5,000 word families, there are reliable differences in vocabulary load between citations from different corpora, and the magnitude of difference between citations from authentic corpora can be equivalent to the magnitude of difference between authentic corpora and graded reader corpora. The paper concludes with a discussion of the results in relation to language learner use of concordances.

Students’ and Teachers’ Perspectives on EFL Textbook For Senior High School Students

<p><em>The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of an English textbook “Bahasa Inggris SMA/MA/SMK/MAK Kelas X” from the perspectives of students and teachers. The textbook was prepared by the Indonesian Ministry of National Education for the 10th-grade students and used by some teachers during the 2018-2019 academic year. The evaluation of the concern for the textbook is carried out at the macro level based on eleven parameters. Data was obtained through student questionnaires administered to 94 students and through interviews with four teachers. The data were analyzed and grouped according to 11 criteria used in this study for the evaluation of the particular textbook. The results revealed that both teachers and students felt negative about some of the characteristics of the textbook. It was found that the reading passages needed to be simplified in terms of vocabulary load and that the grammar needed to be presented in detail. The majority of students indicated that the level of the textbook was not appropriate for the particular age group. The teachers pointed out that the tasks and activities were not organized from easy to difficult stages. Also, the listening activities were not supported by audio recordings that should have been included in the textbook. Moreover, the students expected the book to include multiple-choice exercises. It implies that some aspects of the textbook need to be revised, and the audio recordings must be included to support the listening activities. On the other hand, one of the strengths of the textbook was that the activities in the textbook involved opportunities that encourage students’ creativity, interest, and curiosity.</em></p><strong>Keywords:</strong> EFL textbook, textbook evaluation, macro evaluation

Vocabulary in Traditional Chinese Medicine

Abstract This article reports on a corpus-based study of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) vocabulary. It first provides a vocabulary profile of English-medium Traditional Chinese Medicine textbooks and journal articles using Nation’s (2012) British National Corpus/Corpus of Contemporary American English (BNC/COCA 25,000) frequency word lists and supplementary word lists of proper nouns, abbreviations, and compounds. Then, it categorizes items outside Nation’s BNC/COCA into Chinese loan words (e.g., qi, yang) and medical lexis (e.g., cinnamomi, rehmanniae), which cover 5.93% of the TCM Corpora in total. The next analysis focuses on Schmitt and Schmitt’s (2014) high, mid, low-frequency vocabulary framework and how it differs from Western medicine. Finally, a vocabulary load analysis shows that to reach 98%, 13,000 word families plus four supplementary lists and two TCM-specific lists are needed. Together, these analyses provide us with a rounded picture of TCM vocabulary. Implications for pedagogy and suggestions for future research follow.

Investigating the technical vocabulary of Plumbing

Knowledge of a trade such as Plumbing involves understanding and use of its technical vocabulary. Trainee plumbers need support for the development of their language as they grow in their knowledge of their profession, and yet little is known about this vocabulary. This article reports on the challenges of dealing with technical vocabulary from the point of view of tutors in a polytechnic in Aotearoa/New Zealand, and analysis of a written corpus (565,881 running words) and a spoken corpus (133,093 running words) of Plumbing developed at the same institution. Technical vocabulary was identified from the written corpus, using frequency principles, a semantic analysis of a rating task for tutors, and checking the corpus and technical dictionaries. A word list of Plumbing was developed, along with a list of technical abbreviations and another of proper nouns. The Plumbing word list covers over 30% of the written corpus and just over 11% of the spoken corpus. Nation’s (2012) BNC/COCA frequency lists were adapted and a vocabulary load analysis found over 8,000 word families plus supplementary lists for 98% coverage of written and 5,000 word families plus supplementary lists for spoken Plumbing texts. The article ends with suggestions for pedagogy and suggestions for future research.

Separability of Lexical and Morphological Knowledge: Evidence from Language Minority Children.

Lexical and morphological knowledge of school-aged children are correlated with each other, and are often difficult to distinguish. One reason for this might be that many tasks currently used to assess morphological knowledge require children to inflect or derive real words in the language, thus recruiting their vocabulary knowledge. The current study investigated the possible separability of lexical and morphological knowledge using two complementary approaches. First, we examined the correlations between vocabulary and four morphological tasks tapping different aspects of morphological processing and awareness, and using either real-word or pseudo-word stimuli. Thus, we tested the hypothesis that different morphological tasks recruit lexical knowledge to various degrees. Second, we compared the Hebrew vocabulary and morphological knowledge of 5th grade language minority speaking children to that of their native speaking peers. This comparison allows us to ask whether reduced exposure to the societal language might differentially influence vocabulary and morphological knowledge. The results demonstrate that indeed different morphological tasks rely on lexical knowledge to varying degrees. In addition, language minority students had significantly lower performance in vocabulary and in morphological tasks that recruited vocabulary knowledge to a greater extent. In contrast, both groups performed similarly in abstract morphological tasks with a lower vocabulary load. These results demonstrate that lexical and morphological knowledge may rely on partially separable learning mechanisms, and highlight the importance of distinguishing between these two linguistic components.