High frequency words, which are key to a text, must be mastered to achieve minimum levels of reading proficiency. However, knowledge about the frequency of items in a language is very limited. Given this consideration, WordSift (www.wordsift.org), a word cloud tool based on high frequency and key words can assist English as a Foreign Language…

Jeff McQuillan offers case studies of intermediate level language learners who read young adult and adult fiction successfully as an argument against explicit vocabulary instruction. Case studies provide useful insights into whatever is being investigated but may not always be generalizable. However, McQuillan's reference to case studies has made…

This paper sets forth an integrated way of introducing bibliometrics to relatively non-quantitative audiences, such as librarians and iSchool students. The integrative device is the bibliogram, a linguistic object consisting of a seed term and the terms that co-occur with it, ranked by their co-occurrence counts with the seed--a standard…

There are 26 letters in the English language. These letters, in various combinations, represent the 44 sounds in the language. Teaching students the basic letter-sound combinations gives them access to sounding out approximately 84% of the words in English print. There needs to be equal amounts of time need to be spent on teaching the meanings of…

Despite the vast extent of the English vocabulary, it has been estimated that only around 2400 high frequency word families, which are found on Browne, Culligan, and Phillips' (2013) "New General Service List" (NGSL), make up over 92% of most general English texts. Several studies have shown that a word must be encountered anywhere from…

With the advances in technology, wordlists retrieved from computer corpora have become increasingly popular in recent years. The lexical items in those wordlists are usually selected, according to a set of robust frequency and dispersion criteria, from large corpora of authentic and naturally occurring language. Corpus wordlists are of great value…

This article is a personal view of the application of research on vocabulary to teaching and how there are three different types or categories of relationship between that research and the teaching to which it is applied: first, where the research is not applied or not applied well, second, where it is reasonably well applied, and third, where it…

This article reports on the design and use of a profiler for lexical sophistication (i.e., use of advanced vocabulary), which was created to assess the lexical richness of intermediate and advanced Swedish second language (L2) learners' French and Italian. It discusses how teachers' judgments (TJs) of word difficulty can contribute to the…

Larry Bates argues for vocabulary instruction that emphasizes useful, high-frequency words rather than lists of rarely used terms. He suggests resources for finding frequency ratings for words and for determining appropriately challenging words for students. (Contains 3 figures and 3 notes.)

Reports the development of a 227-word, primary-level list that was drawn from words appearing in more than 400 books for beginning readers. (FL)

Describes a complete, interactive, introductory German course on CD for adults. Designed for independent learning, the course emphasizes speaking and listening, though it provides a basis in reading and writing. Describes the role of contrastive grammar, proficiency-oriented teaching, the notational-functional approach, and word frequency counts…