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<dd>The following is excerpted from chapter 14 in <i>Second Language
Vocabulary Acquisition</i>, 1997, edited
<dd>by J. Coady and T. Huckin Cambridge U. Press.<br>
<br>
<dd>Lexicon Size Research<br>
<br>
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<dd><x-tab> </x-tab><x-tab> </x-tab>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>
<br>
<dd><x-tab> </x-tab><x-tab> </x-tab>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>
<br>
<dd><x-tab> </x-tab><x-tab> </x-tab>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>
<br>
<dd><x-tab> </x-tab><x-tab> </x-tab>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>
<br>
<dd><x-tab> </x-tab><x-tab> </x-tab>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>
<br>
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Chair<x-tab> </x-tab><x-tab> </x-tab>Phone:
(740) 593-4566 <br>
Department of
Linguistics<x-tab> </x-tab>Fax:
(740) 593-2967 <br>
Ohio
University<x-tab> </x-tab><a href="http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/coady.htm">http</a><a href="http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/coady.htm">://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/coady.htm</a>
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Athens, OH
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