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Where/when, incidentally, did the term "word families" arise?<BR>
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Lynne Murphy<BR>
Baylor University<BR>
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From: James Coady <coady@OHIOU.EDU><BR>
To: ADS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU<BR>
Subject: How Many Words<BR>
Date: Fri, Nov 19, 1999, 11:15 AM<BR>
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<BLOCKQUOTE><FONT SIZE="4">The following is excerpted from chapter 14 in <I>Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition</I>, 1997, edited by J. Coady and T. Huckin Cambridge U. Press.<BR>
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Lexicon Size Research<BR>
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<FONT SIZE="4"> There is also a significant disagreement in the literature over the total amount of vocabulary known by a university educated native speaker, i.e. the target of English for academic purposes. These arguments are important because they tend to be a major determinant of a given teacher’s philosophy about vocabulary instruction. For example, if one believes that educated university native speakers tend to know 50,000 to 100,000 words, then it is seems useless to try to teach a tiny subset of that amount. On the other hand, if one believes that university students tend to know about 16,000 base words, then teaching a thousand or so words does not seem like such a bad idea.<BR>
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For example, Nagy et Anderson (1984) estimated that there are 85,533 word families in printed school English (grades 3-9). They counted as one word family semantically and morphologically related words such as enthusiast, enthusiasts, and enthusiasm. <BR>
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In contrast, Goulden, Nation, & Read (1990) estimate that an average native speaker English speaking university student has a vocabulary of 17,000 word families (a base-form and its derived forms)<BR>
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D’Anna, Zechmeister, & Hall (1991) based their study upon the <U>Oxford American Dictionary</U> (OAD) from which they eliminated proper names, archaic words, technical terms, etc. in order to form a corpus of what they call functionally important words. They then asked their subjects to choose from a five-point scale how well they felt they knew a sample of almost 200 words from the OAD. They then extrapolated from these results and concluded that the average number of different words known by a university student is 16,785. Some further issues were explored in two follow-up studies, Zechmeister, D’Anna, Hall, Hall, & Smith (1993) and Zechmeister, Chronis, Cull, D’Anna, & Healy (1995). For example, in the latter study the subjects were given multiple choice tests to determine how accurate their self-rating was. They found that subjects typically overestimated their knowledge, particularly when there were difficult distracters. Moreover, they again extrapolated from their data that junior high students knew fewer words (9,684) than freshmen college students (16, 679) than older adults (21,252). <BR>
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Meara (chapter 2, this volume) discusses how difficult it is to carry out effective research on measuring the size of the lexicon and proposes the use of some standardized vocabulary tests which he has developed. They are simple to administer and remarkably sensitive to knowledge across a range of different frequency bands or a range of different specialist areas of lexis. Further he argues that as the lexicon grows, organization becomes a more significant factor than size. He therefore proposes a standardized measure of the relative organization of the lexicon. Finally, he feels that both measures together can be a method of assessing overall lexical competence.<BR>
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