This study looks at how much input is needed to gain enough repetition of the 1st 9,000 words of English for learning to occur. It uses corpora of various sizes and composition to see how many tokens of input would be needed to gain at least twelve repetitions and to meet most of the words at eight of the nine 1000 word family levels. Corpus sizes…

The English Language Institute (now the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies) at Victoria University of Wellington has a long history of corpus-based vocabulary research, especially after the arrival of the second director of the institute, H. V. George, and the appointment of Helen Barnard, whom George knew in India. George's…

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…

The Academic Word List (Coxhead 2000) consists of 570 word families that are frequent and wide ranging in academic texts. It was created by counting the frequency, range, and evenness of spread of word forms in a specially constructed academic corpus. This study examines the words in the Academic Word List (AWL) to see if the existence of…

This study compared four different approaches to identifying technical words in an anatomy text. The first approach used a four step rating scale, and was used as the comparison for evaluating the other three approaches. It had a high degree of reliability. The least successful approach was that using clues provided by the writer such as labels in…

A word frequency study of two graded readers and an unsimplified text indicated that graded readers facilitated better foreign-language reading and vocabulary learning than did unsimplified texts. It was found that students needed to read several same-level texts to master vocabulary, and that vocabulary mastery was not necessary for successful…