Vocabulary size and the skills of listening, reading and writing

Abstract

This paper presents an empirical study investigating the relationship between vocabulary size and the skills of listening, reading and writing in English as a foreign language (EFL). The participants were 88 EFL learners from lower secondary education whose language skills were assessed as part of the national school leaving examination in Denmark. Learners' receptive vocabulary size was found to be strongly associated with their reading and writing abilities and moderately associated with their listening ability. However, vocabulary size could still explain a significant and substantial portion of the variance in the listening scores. These results thus emphasise the importance of vocabulary size for language proficiency. Furthermore, it was found that the majority of the learners did not know the most frequent 2000 words in English, but if they did, they would also perform adequately in the listening, reading and writing tests. These findings therefore suggest that the 2000 vocabulary level is a crucial learning goal for low-level EFL learners.

Notes

1.When estimating what percentage of words in a text a learner knows or needs to know, there are different ways of counting lexical units. Typically, researchers count either word tokens or word types. Word tokens refer to the number of individual occurrences of words in the text whereas word types refer to the number of different words. This means that the sentence ‘The cat ate the mouse’ contains five word tokens and four types (the, cat, ate, mouse).

2.A ‘word family’ is typically defined as the base word plus its inflections and most important derivational variants (e.g. context, contexts, contextual, contextualise, contextualised, contextualising, uncontextualised). However, there is no consensus as to exactly which derivations should be included in a word family. See Nation (2006) for various criteria.

3.International English Language Testing System.

4.Lexical Frequency Profile is a measure of lexical sophistication in the sense that it can calculate the proportion of high- and low-frequency word families in learners' written compositions.