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Building on Jack Richard's interest in vocabulary, this paper looks at the importance of morphology (how words are formed) in language learning and teaching. It describes why knowledge of morphology is important, and how it affects vocabulary learning. It provides clear guidelines on what word parts to focus on, how much time to spend on word parts and what a teacher (and learners) should do about word parts. Morphological knowledge involving derivational affixes becomes particularly important when learners know the first 2000-3000 words of English. One of the major activities for developing morphological awareness is cutting words into parts and relating the meanings of the parts to the meaning of the whole word. Teachers should help learners develop morphological awareness, train learners in word part strategies, and help learners to learn frequent word parts. The paper includes activities to achieve these goals in the classroom, as well as links that provide material for classroom use.

Most teachers are concerned about the teaching of vocabulary. However, it is much more effective to focus on the ways in which vocabulary can be learned. This article looks at the jobs of the teacher, which include, in order of importance, (1) designing a balanced course, (2) organizing classroom work and homework, (3) training the learners in how to learn, (4) testing, and (5) teaching vocabulary. These jobs apply to the learning of vocabulary through independent study and learning through language use. There is a brief description of the author's ideal vocabulary learning program, which includes a balance of learning opportunities.

Two commonly used test types to assess vocabulary knowledge for the purpose of reading are size and levels tests. This article first reviews several frequently stated purposes of such tests (e.g., materials selection, tracking vocabulary growth) and provides a reasoned argument for the precision needed to serve such purposes. Then three sources of inaccuracy in existing tests are examined: the overestimation of lexical knowledge from guessing or use of test strategies under meaning-recognition item formats; the overestimation of vocabulary knowledge when receptive understanding of all word family members is assumed from a correct response to an item assessing knowledge of just one family member; and the limited precision that a small, random sample of target words has in representing the population of words from which it is drawn. The article concludes that existing tests lack the accuracy needed for many specified testing purposes and discusses possible improvements going forward.

Extensive reading is one of a range of activities that can be used in a language learning course. Ideally, the choice of activities to go into a course should be guided by principles which are well supported by research. Similarly, the way each of those activities is used should be guided by well-justified principles. In this article, we look at the principles justifying the inclusion of extensive reading in a course, and then look in detail at a set of principles guiding how extensive reading can best be carried out to result in substantial vocabulary learning. Extensive reading can result in a wide range of learning outcomes, but in this article we narrow our focus on vocabulary learning (for similar analyses of a wide range of vocabulary learning activities see Webb and Nation [in preparation]).

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.

Recently, a large number of vocabulary tests have been made available to language teachers, testers, and researchers. Unfortunately, most of them have been launched with inadequate validation evidence. The field of language testing has become increasingly more rigorous in the area of test validation, but developers of vocabulary tests have generally not given validation sufficient attention in the past. This paper argues for more rigorous and systematic procedures for test development, starting from a more precise specification of the test's purpose, intended testees and educational context, the particular aspects of vocabulary knowledge which are being measured, and the way in which the test scores should be interpreted. It also calls for greater assessment literacy among vocabulary test developers, and greater support for the end users of the tests, for instance, with the provision of detailed users' manuals. Overall, the authors present what they feel are the minimum requirements for vocabulary test development and validation. They argue that the field should self-police itself more rigorously to ensure that these requirements are met or exceeded, and made explicit for those using vocabulary tests.

This article describes the visual nature of the reading process as it relates to reading speed. It points out that there is a physical limit on normal reading speed and beyond this limit the reading process will be different from normal reading where almost every word is attended to. The article describes a range of activities for developing reading fluency, and suggests how the development of fluency can become part of a reading programme.

The primary aim of this study was to examine the vocabulary size of native speakers of English in New Zealand secondary schools. Two equivalent forms of the 20,000 version of the vocabulary size test were used in this study. Two hundred and twenty-seven 13-18-year-old native speakers of English at secondary school took an individually administered version of the test. The data from this study fits with the vocabulary size estimates for younger native speakers of Biemiller and Slonim ("J Educ Psychol" 93:498-520, 2001). The results suggest that most native speakers at secondary school have enough general purpose vocabulary to cope with their reading at school, and any deliberate attention to vocabulary should focus on subject-specific vocabulary.

The English Language Institute (now the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies) at Victoria University of Wellington has a long history of corpus-based vocabulary research, especially after the arrival of the second director of the institute, H. V. George, and the appointment of Helen Barnard, whom George knew in India. George's successor, Graeme Kennedy, also saw corpus linguistics as a very fruitful and important area of applied language research. This interest in corpus-based vocabulary studies led to an attempt to develop a test of receptive vocabulary size (Goulden, Nation & Read 1990). It became clear that a standard word family unit was needed, to enable consistency between different word families and different researchers. The result was a collaboration between two researchers in the School, Laurie Bauer and Paul Nation (1993). A series of steps must be followed in the creation of frequency-list based vocabulary size tests if the methodological difficulties of dictionary-based word sampling are to be avoided: (1) Develop a standard and reliable unit of word counting that suits the goals of the test; (2) Develop substantial word family lists that include virtually all the vocabulary to be tested; (3) Use corpora to arrange the word families in the lists into frequency levels; (4) Draw representative samples of word families from the lists so that no word frequency level is overrepresented or underrepresented in the samples; and (5) Decide on the test format and develop items for the tests. In many ways, the rate of progress through these steps has been determined by the availability of computer hardware and software. Because making word family lists is so time-consuming, for many years the 2,000 word families from the General Service List and the University Word List, the latter replaced by the Academic Word List (Coxhead 2000), were the only lists available. The availability of faster computers, larger corpora, data from the British National Corpus and a specially written word family building program (AffixAppender by Chris Andreae) enabled the creation of further lists. Even with all of this support, making word families was still time-consuming, and it was only in 2012 that the twenty-fifth 1,000 word families list was finished. In this article, the authors discuss the creation of the Vocabulary Size Test (VST) and the two directions recent research on it has taken: (1) bilingual versions of the test to use with non-native speakers of English; and (2) computerised versions of the test. Testing the vocabulary size of native speakers is also discussed. The authors conclude that the most pressing need at present is for a standardised vocabulary size test that can be used with very young native speakers of English and young non-native speakers who are not yet able to read in English.

In this article Paul Nation responds to Thomas Cobb's "Numbers or Numerology? A Response to Nation (2014) and McQuillan (2016)" (EJ1117024). Nation begins by clarifying his own position on vocabulary learning and goes on to highlight points made in Cobb's article with which he is in agreement, while drawing from his 2014 article, "How Much Input Do You Need to Learn the Most Frequent 9,000 Words" (EJ1044345).

Research with Japanese learners of English (Brown et al., 2020) has shown that Japanese learners of English typically have inadequate knowledge of the word parts of English. Research with other groups of learners also tend to show a wide range of degrees of knowledge of word parts (Laufer & Cobb, 2020; Sasao & Webb, 2017). This lack of knowledge has important implications for vocabulary size and reading in English because a very large proportion of Level 6 word families (Bauer & Nation, 1993) include many family members that contain prefixes and suffixes. Related to this, a large proportion of the tokens in any text are complex words (Nation, 2022), that is, words containing affixes. The study of word parts is called morphology, and occasionally I will use this term and its adjective, morphological, when referring to word parts, largely because first language research on word parts uses the terms morphological awareness and morphological knowledge. Word part knowledge is closely related to vocabulary size, and vocabulary size is closely related to proficien- cy level. This article looks at this relationship and tries to relate these three factors using the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the development and validation of a Vietnamese bilingual version of the Vocabulary Size Test--a test which measures written receptive vocabulary size. The test can be used to measure the English vocabulary size of Vietnamese learners of English. A learner's total vocabulary size is calculated by multiplying their test result by 100. The research adds to our knowledge of vocabulary size testing in the following ways. First, it shows that a bilingual version of a monolingual test performs in much the same way as the monolingual test, distinguishing learners of different proficiency levels and returning lower scores at later levels of the test. Second, it shows that every level of the test should be sat, otherwise there will be a considerable underestimation of learners' vocabulary sizes. This suggests limitations to the previously accepted assumption that learners' vocabulary growth can be largely related to word frequency. Third, it shows that bilingual tests are feasible alternatives to more challenging and time-consuming monolingual tests. (Contains 8 tables.)

This study presents a list of the highest frequency collocations of spoken English based on carefully applied criteria. In the literature, more than forty terms have been used for designating multi-word units, which are generally not well defined. To avoid this confusion, six criteria are strictly applied. The ten million word BNC spoken section was used as the data source, and the 1,000 most frequent spoken word types from that corpus were all investigated as pivot words. The most striking finding was that there is a large number of collocations meeting the six criteria and a large number of these would qualify for inclusion in the most frequent 2,000 words of English, if no distinction was made between single words and collocations. Many of these collocations could be usefully taught in an elementary speaking course.

The Academic Word List (Coxhead 2000) consists of 570 word families that are frequent and wide ranging in academic texts. It was created by counting the frequency, range, and evenness of spread of word forms in a specially constructed academic corpus. This study examines the words in the Academic Word List (AWL) to see if the existence of unrelated meanings for the same word form (homographs) has resulted in the inclusion of words in the list which would not be there if their clearly different meanings were distinguished. The study shows that only a small proportion of the word families contain homographs, and in almost all cases, one of the members of a pair or group of homographs is much more frequent and widely used than the others. Only three word families ("intelligence," "offset," and "panel") drop out of the list because none of their homographs separately meet the criteria for inclusion in the list. A list of homographs in the AWL is provided, with frequencies for those where each of the members of a homograph pair are reasonably frequent.

This study compared four different approaches to identifying technical words in an anatomy text. The first approach used a four step rating scale, and was used as the comparison for evaluating the other three approaches. It had a high degree of reliability. The least successful approach was that using clues provided by the writer such as labels in diagrams, typographical marking, and definitions. Using a technical dictionary was more successful, but had an accuracy rate around 80%. The fourth approach compared frequency of occurrence in the specialized text with frequency in a large more general corpus. This worked well, but failed to identify words like "neck, chest, skin" which were also in common usage. It also could not separate collocates of technical words ("superior, posterior, transverse") from technical words. If collocates are included the accuracy rate is close to 90%. Being able to reliably identify technical vocabulary provides an essential starting point for looking at how learners and teachers should deal with technical vocabulary. (Contains 1 figure and 6 tables.)

Describes a systematic approach to designing and improving foreign languages courses based on a model of course design. Suggests that the strength of systematically following a model is that the important things are not overlooked. (Author/VWL)

Examines what percentage of coverage of text is needed for unassisted reading for pleasure, where learners are able to read without the interruption of looking up words. Looks at the effect of three densities of unknown vocabulary on two measures of reading comprehension, a multiple-choice test and a cued written recall test. (Author/VWL)

Examines research on learning related vocabulary, such as lexical sets, a unit of vocabulary or specific items sharing certain formal or semantic features. This research shows that learning related words at the same time makes learning them more difficult and suggests that this difficulty can be avoided if related words are learned separately. (Author/VWL)