How much input do you need to learn the most frequent 9,000 words?

Abstract

This study looks at how much input is needed to gain enough repetition of the 1st 9,000 words of English for learning to occur. It uses corpora of various sizes and composition to see how many tokens of input would be needed to gain at least twelve repetitions and to meet most of the words at eight of the nine 1000 word family levels. Corpus sizes of just under 200,000 tokens and 3 million tokens provide an average of at least 12 repetitions at the 2nd 1,000 word level and the 9th 1,000 word level respectively. In terms of novels, this equates to two to twenty-five novels (at 120,000 tokens per novel). Allowing for learning rates of around 1,000 word families a year, these are manageable amounts of input. Freely available "Mid-frequency Readers" have been created to provide the suitable kind of input needed.

How Effective Can Additive Assigned Extracurricular Reading Be? More Good News

“…On the second research of the relationship between the GEPT gains and the reading frequency, unfortunately, no significant correlation was observed. Based on the tremendous advancement of recent research on vocabulary and reading amounts, especially the work of Nation [6], the importance of frequent reading was truly revealed. He provided convincing empirical data on how extensive a learner needs to read to acquire the first 9 th 1,000 word families (98% coverage of running words in a variety of texts), in both total number of words and time length for reading every day.…”

“…For instance, students at higher levels need to learn the words at mid to low frequency levels. These words occur less frequently in reading texts; as a result, readers will have to read more to create enough exposure opportunities to meet the words [6,8]. Nonetheless, research also suggests that the reading speed slows down when readers read difficult texts because they need more time to process [31], which may suggest why depending on the total words of reading is not the best indicator.…”

“…So, frequency of reading may matter more than researchers have assumed. Higher frequencies of reading could help practice and maintain reading skills, and imprint in our mind [6,[24][25]. Reading regularly and frequently provides for supportive conditions for incidental learning.…”

The Inefficiency of Vocabulary Instruction

“…Still, our finding that free reading is superior to direct instruction for word acquisition is consistent with analyses that used a very different approach to the problem, that of corpus analysis. Nation (2014), for example, looked at a large corpus of classic novels to determine how much one would have to read to have a reasonable chance of acquiring new words. Potentially unknown words that occurred 12 or more times in the text were considered "acquired" in Nation's study.…”

Reading a whole book to learn vocabulary

“…Incidental learning results in learning small numbers of strongly known words and reasonable numbers of words at various strengths of knowledge (Pellicer-Sánchez & Schmitt, 2010;Pigada & Schmitt, 2006;Waring & Takaki, 2003). Repetition has a strong effect on learning from reading, and the small amounts of strongly known words learned can become large amounts with substantial quantities of reading (Nagy, Herman & Anderson, 1985;Nation, 2014a). Adding a deliberate element to the learning greatly increases learning (Fraser, 1999;Mondria, 2003;Paribakht & Wesche, 1993;Sonbul & Schmitt, 2009), with vocabulary exercises having a stronger effect than dictionary look-up (Laufer & Rozovski-Roitblatt, 2011).…”