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…

Published work on vocabulary assessment has grown substantially in the last 10 years, but it is still somewhat outside the mainstream of the field. There has been a recent call for those developing vocabulary tests to apply professional standards to their work, especially in validating their instruments for specified purposes before releasing them…

The words in a language or language variety are often rank ordered in lists that are meant to reflect the relative importance of those words to language users and learners of a language. This rank ordering is done on the basis of the relative prevalence of words in a corpus. Lexical prevalence is often operationalized as measures of frequency,…

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 article provides introductory, step-by-step explanations of how to make a specialized corpus and an annotated frequency-based vocabulary list. One of my objectives is to help teachers, instructors, program administrators, and graduate students with little experience in this field be able to do so using free resources. Instructions are first…

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…

Learners of English might be familiar with several online monolingual dictionaries that are not necessarily the best choices for the English as Second/Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) context. Although these monolingual online dictionaries contain definitions, pronunciation guides, and other elements normally found in general-use dictionaries, they are…

There is little dispute that formulaic sequences form an important part of the lexicon, but to date there has been no principled way to prioritize the inclusion of such items in pedagogic materials, such as ESL/EFL textbooks or tests of vocabulary knowledge. While wordlists have been used for decades, they have only provided information about…

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…

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…

This article highlights key issues surrounding the assessment and accountability mandates of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) for English language learners (ELLs). The policy requires high-stakes testing of ELLs in English--a language that these students, by definition, have not yet mastered. After offering background on current federal education…

In China many non-English majors, who often score high on English exams that emphasize reading comprehension and grammar, have difficulty finding the English words they need to express their ideas in speaking and writing. This problem is not unusual, and it is often difficult for students to use their receptive reading and listening vocabulary for…

Describes the compilation of the Future Teachers' Frequency Vocabulary, based on 236 written compositions by students at a teacher training college in Belgrade. Results were compared with the Child Frequency Vocabulary compiled in 1983, based on children's compositions. (LET)

Describes the development and evaluation of a new academic word list that was completed from a corpus of 3.5 million running words of written academic text by examining the range and frequency of words outside the first 2,000 most frequently occurring words in English. Explains the problems with existing word lists intended to guide materials…

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…