Teaching English vocabulary

The development of vocabulary lists and reference works

• 1944 – TWB: The Teacher's Word Book by Edward L. Thorndike (1874–1949), containing lists of the most frequent words in written English. Two frequency counts were included: one by Thorndike and Lorge, and another identifying the 570 most common words by Lorge.
• 1953 – GSL: A General Service List of English Words by Michael West. Part 1 contains 2,000 words, rather than 20,000, selected for their usefulness in general English. Frequency is indicated on a scale of 1 to 5.
• 1960 – BSV: A Basic Sight Vocabulary by Edward William Dolch. The list contains 220 words and had considerable influence on the teaching of reading at elementary level in the USA.

The basic words in Dolch's list are:

Sight words are words whose meaning the reader grasps so rapidly that they “do not seem to come between him and meaning at all”. Because these words occur so frequently in reading matter, children should ideally recognise them instantly by sight.

They are described as “basic” because the list includes service words used across many different subjects: conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, adverbs, adjectives, auxiliary verbs and some regular verbs. Nouns are not included.

Dolch considered nouns to belong to a different category because each noun is associated with particular subject matter. Wilga Rivers also observes that first-language readers rely heavily on content words such as nouns to obtain meaning, whereas second-language readers cannot necessarily use them as rapidly.

• 1965 – L. A. Hill's five lists: 500, 750, 1,000, 1,500 and 2,075 headword vocabularies used by OUP authors. Hill's work illustrates the continuing importance of graded vocabulary selection. Note that even vocabularies of 3,000 or 5,000 words are insufficient for fluent reading of all kinds of texts. However, knowledge of the most widely used words can provide a basis for intelligent guessing or inferencing when learners encounter unfamiliar content words.

Among L. A. Hill's many publications for English language learning was A Picture Vocabulary. The Teacher's Book for this work contains 1,040 pictures of people, animals, things, actions and qualities, mostly taken from the General Service List of English Words, the Supplementary Word-List and the Indonesian Syllabus for English. See the bibliography of L. A. Hill .

• 1968 – The Longman Structural Readers Handbook: contains a vocabulary of 2,340 words. The handbook notes that approximately 10,000 words are needed to read and understand an English novel while having to look up no more than four or five words per page.
• 1974 – Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English: uses a defining vocabulary of 2,100 words. These are the words used to formulate dictionary definitions so that they remain comprehensible to learners from non-English-speaking backgrounds.
• 1974 – Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English: containing approximately 61,000 words in the edition referred to here.
• 1980 – The Cambridge English Lexicon: by Roland Hindmarsh. Words are graded for difficulty on a scale of 1 to 7. Words in bands 1–5 were considered necessary for candidates taking the Cambridge First Certificate in English examination, while bands 6–7 were also required for candidates taking the Cambridge Proficiency in English examination.

Vocabulary selection criteria

During the 1960s and 1970s, approaches to vocabulary selection in English language teaching tended to emphasise several criteria:

1. Frequency of use
2. Style and register: was the vocabulary primarily used in speech or writing?
3. Difficulty: was it appropriate to the learners' level, and was it learnable, teachable and manageable in terms of memory load?
4. Pedagogic value: could the vocabulary contribute effectively to a structurally based syllabus?

A good example of the last criterion can be found in volume 1 of Geoffrey Broughton's Success With English course (Penguin Books, 1968), which was widely used in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The course introduced words such as “plane”, “wing”, “tail” and “monkey” at an early stage because they were easy for an artist to illustrate unambiguously and could be recycled as part of the course's structural grading.

These were not necessarily the vocabulary items that would have been most relevant or functional to learners if vocabulary had been selected according to semantic or communicative criteria.

By the 1980s, functional load and communicative need had become increasingly important criteria for vocabulary selection. By this time, syllabus guidelines were being developed by the Council of Europe. See Waystage 1990 (pre-intermediate level) and Threshold 1990 (intermediate level), syllabus specifications by J. A. Van Ek and J. L. M. Trim. These were originally published by Pergamon Press in 1979/1980 and later revised and corrected by Cambridge University Press.

For a much more detailed approach to specifying language needs, see Communicative Syllabus Design: A Sociolinguistic Model for Designing the Content of Purpose-Specific Language Programmes (Cambridge University Press, 1981) by John Munby. This is better regarded as a reference work than as a practical working document.

Course books based on “the communicative approach” began to appear in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It would be misleading to suggest that coursebook writers had ignored learners' needs and language in use before this period. However, the 1980s saw the appearance of several coursebooks that explicitly claimed to be “lexical” in their approach to communicative language teaching.

Not all of these were successful. Some “lexically based” coursebooks lacked the structural thread that both teachers and learners required and were unable to compete with structurally based market leaders such as Streamline English Departures (Oxford, 1979).

The Collins COBUILD Project, with its use of large corpora of authentic spoken and written texts, produced valuable dictionaries and reference books, including dictionaries of phrasal verbs. However, some of the coursebooks developed as offshoots of the project had a relatively limited shelf life.

Refusing “to adapt texts to classroom use” on the basis of a narrow definition of “authenticity”

The limited popularity of course materials that abandoned tight control over structure and vocabulary may partly be explained by course designers' narrow definition of authenticity. See Robert O'Neill's third proposition in Dogmas & Delusions in Current EFL Methodology (May 1999).

There is a danger in taking lexical frequency from large collections of authentic texts and assuming that the most frequently occurring words are automatically the most useful ones for learners. A corpus containing texts from all walks of life may produce a very generalised list of useful words without identifying the vocabulary that is most relevant to learners studying at elementary level in particular situations, such as living in UK cities or staying in holiday resorts.

Setting difficulty levels for beginners and elementary learners

For beginners and elementary learners, the intuition of teachers who know their learners' immediate social environment and language needs may provide a better basis for vocabulary selection. At these levels, some degree of vocabulary control is particularly important because learners need the language required for basic survival and everyday communication.

A teacher's attempt to simplify language so that a beginner has a realistic chance of understanding it can itself be regarded as an authentic use of language. The definition of “authenticity” need not therefore be restricted to unmodified language taken directly from the street, the media or other real-world sources. Both pedagogical and everyday communicative environments can be included in a broader understanding of authentic language use.

Setting priorities according to needs at higher levels

It is often claimed that texts should become more authentic as learners progress to higher levels. However, English has an enormous vocabulary, containing far more lexical items than any individual speaker can expect to learn in a lifetime. Vocabulary selection therefore remains important even for advanced learners.

Many poorly planned English lessons have been justified on the grounds that learners are being given an opportunity to experience “authentic” materials. Authenticity alone, however, does not guarantee usefulness.

A genuinely communicative language course should take learners' language needs into account. A corpus containing texts from “all walks of life” will not necessarily produce the most useful vocabulary for learners preparing for higher education, working in hospital wards or taking jobs in a UK dockyard.

More recently, developments in computational linguistics have made it possible to categorise corpus data according to particular occupational and social fields. There are now several concordancers, some available on the Internet, which allow users to search categories of corpus data that come closer to meeting particular teaching and learning needs.

Vocabulary materials on this site