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…

In addition to movies, television programs, and TED Talks presentations, podcasts are an increasingly popular form of media that promotes authentic public discourse for diverse audiences, including university professors and students. However, English language teachers in the English as a second language/English as a foreign language contexts might…

Growing a large vocabulary is one of the most important tasks of language learners and yet research reports on low levels of lexical knowledge for English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. In EFL contexts, textbooks are a vital source of exposure to English and the words that are worth learning. The New Concept English textbook series is…

This study examined whether the reading passages in the new series of English-language textbooks for high-school students in Vietnam fostered reading comprehension and incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading by looking at four factors: the number of unfamiliar words in the texts, the importance of these words for text comprehension, the…

Schmitt and Schmitt (2014) labelled the first 4,000 to 9,000 word families as mid-frequency vocabulary and highlighted its essential nature based on Nation's (2006) estimate that knowledge of the first 9,000 word families would provide 98% coverage of various texts. To attain this goal, this study first measured the vocabulary level of Voice of…

The present study explores the under-researched area of collocation use with learners from different proficiency levels. The study investigates different types of collocations and the learners' elaboration of their collocation use. A total of 194 students from three different years of study in a Chinese university wrote compositions on the same…

This study examined classroom routine and interactional patterns of Grade 5 English Language reading comprehension lessons through delineating the speech act functions of instructional discourse that was based on Malcolm's sociolinguistic model (Malcolm, 1979a; Malcolm, 1979b; Malcolm, 1982; Malcolm, 1986). It also evaluated the classroom…

This research combines corpus-based and intuition-based approaches in developing a list of important words in business news that Thai learners of business English need to know. The Thai corpus of English for Business and Economic News (Thai-EBEN) has been compiled from English business news articles in the Thai press. A computer concordancing…

For second language learners vocabulary growth is of major importance, and for many learners commercially published coursebooks will be the source of this vocabulary learning. In this preliminary study, input from three levels of the coursebook series "New English File" (Oxenden and Latham-Koenig, 2006; Oxenden, Latham-Koenig, and Seligson, 2004,…

Previous research has found that native English speakers can judge, with a relatively high degree of accuracy, the frequency of words in the English language. However, there has been little investigation of the ability to judge the frequency of high and middle frequency words. Similarly, the accuracy of EFL teachers' frequency judgements remains…