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How large a vocabulary is needed for reading and listening?

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posted on 2020-06-24, 02:14 authored by Paul NationPaul Nation
This article has two goals: to report on the trialling of fourteen 1,000 word-family lists made from the British National Corpus, and to use these lists to see what vocabulary size is needed for unassisted comprehension of written and spoken English. The trialling showed that the lists were properly sequenced and there were no glaring omissions from the lists. If 98% coverage of a text is needed for unassisted comprehension, then a 8,000 to 9,000 word-family vocabulary is needed for comprehension of written text and a vocabulary of 6,000 to 7,000 for spoken text. © 2006 The Canadian Modern Language Review/La Revue canadienne des langues vivantes.

History

Preferred citation

Nation, P. (2006). How large a vocabulary is needed for reading and listening? Canadian Modern Language Review, 63(1), 59-82. https://doi.org/10.3138/cmlr.63.1.59

Journal title

Canadian Modern Language Review

Volume

63

Issue

1

Publication date

2006-01-01

Pagination

59-82

Publisher

University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress)

Publication status

Published

Contribution type

Article

ISSN

0008-4506

eISSN

1710-1131

Language

en

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