We are encouraged by Cobb's (2022) description of changes to the Morpholex profiling tool (https://www.lextutor.ca/cgi-bin/morpho/lex/) resulting in more accurate word classifications. This addresses one point in our recent commentary on Morpholex and on Laufer and Cobb's (2020) study using Morpholex (McLean & Stoeckel, 2021). However, Cobb…

In response to McLean (2021), Laufer (2021) makes three claims which are either not supported by research or are based on studies with important limitations. First is that a vocabulary size, instead of a level, can be used to match learners with lexically appropriate materials despite test creators and research not supporting this. Second is that…

In this article, Charlie Taylor offers a commentary on Yang et al.'s 2021 "Reading in a Foreign Language" article, "Text Difficulty in Extensive Reading: Reading Comprehension and Reading Motivation." In their study, Yang et al. analyzed the effects of text difficulty on the reading comprehension and motivation of high school…

Studies of lexical coverage are valuable because they reveal the importance of vocabulary knowledge to comprehension. Lexical profiling research is also extremely useful because it indicates the vocabulary knowledge necessary to understand different text types such as novels, newspapers, academic lectures, television programs, and movies.…

In the late 1980s Batia Laufer worked with teachers who believed that to understand a text it was enough to understand 80% of the text's word tokens. In response, Laufer set out to calculate the minimal text coverage, i.e., percentage of running words in a text the reader should understand to comprehend it reasonably well. In 1992, she explored…

Aka (2019) conducted an year-long large-scale study demonstrating that Japanese high school students who undertook extensive reading performed better than a control group who undertook grammatical instruction. Those showing the greatest gains were those of lower and intermediate proficiency. The students' achievement was measured in terms of…

Thomas Cobb's 2007 applied linguistics paper, "Computing the Vocabulary Demands of L2 Reading" dealt with whether reading alone can build an adequate reading lexicon in a second language, or whether some sort of extra vocabulary training will normally be required. In the article, Cobb proposed that in the case of adult academic ESL…

In his 2016 article, "What Can Readers Read after Graded Readers?" (EJ1098660), Jeff McQuillan provided data to show that there is an adequate amount of reading material that can be read at or above 98% vocabulary coverage to provide sufficient input to acquire most of the word families from the 2,000- to the 9,000-word-family levels.…

In their paper, Meara and Olmos Alcoy (2010) attempted to find a means of estimating productive second language (L2) vocabulary size based on the premise that many known lexical items simply do not appear in learner-produced texts. To do so, they borrowed an ecological model, in which a capture-recapture formula, the Petersen estimate, is used to…

The calculation of text coverage, that is the proportion of a text covered by a vocabulary of a given size, has become a standardized procedure in recent years. Such calculations provide important information for research and pedagogy about issues such as the goals of vocabulary learning and the ease or difficulty of particular texts. Chujo and…

This study investigates the vocabulary learning opportunities in an ELT course book designed for upper-intermediate learners. All the words appearing in the 12 chapters of the text were analyzed. The results suggest that the text would provide opportunities to deepen knowledge of the second 1,000 most frequent words in English, and would provide a…

This study examined the extent to which glossaries may affect the percentage of known words (coverage) in television programs. The transcripts of 51 episodes of 2 television programs ("House" and "Grey's Anatomy") were analyzed using Range (Heatley, Nation, & Coxhead, 2002) to create glossaries consisting of the low-frequency (less frequent than…

This paper addresses the issue of how we might be able to assess productive vocabulary size in second language learners. It discusses some previous attempts to develop measures of this sort, and argues that a fresh approach is needed in order to overcome some persistent problems that dog research in this area. The paper argues that there might be…

We explore the relationship between second language (L2) learners' vocabulary size, lexical text coverage that their vocabulary provides and their reading comprehension. We also conceptualize "adequate reading comprehension" and look for the lexical threshold for such reading in terms of coverage and vocabulary size. Vocabulary size was…

Fluent reading is essential for successful comprehension. One dimension of reading fluency is reading rate, or reading speed. Because of the importance of reading fluency, fluency development activities should be incorporated into classroom practice. One activity that meets the fluency development conditions proposed by Nation (2007) is speed…