As linguists and language teachers know, there are two main types of vocabulary in daily use: the first is vocabulary we know in a “receptive” way, where we understand the general sense of a word when we read it or hear it; the second is vocabulary we know in a “productive” way, where we are able to use the word in conversation or written communication. 1 In general, a person with a university education has a minimum receptive vocabulary of about 20,000 words. Studies have shown that many of these words – up to 80 percent – belong to the most common “word families” in English. A “word family” is a group of words that are related through their root words. For example, the words help, helping, helpful, helpless, and unhelpful are all part of the same family. By focusing on word families, you can quickly and easily increase your vocabulary.
There are 4,000 word families in standard English. Research has shown than if you learn only the 2,000 most frequent word families, you will be able to understand at least 80% of any text (other than highly technical literature). If you combine these word lists with the Academic Word List (AWL), you will understand up to 90% of the words you read.2, 3
In addition to this key selection of words to learn, you have two ways you can choose to add other new words to your vocabulary. One is faster, but at the expense of long-term memorization. With this first strategy, you read a text using your word family and AWL knowledge, and use the context of the sentences to give you the definitions for the words you don’t understand, with the occasional use of a dictionary to double-check anything that’s particularly confusing. You’ll remember these new words, but may not retain them for long, or be able to use them in the future. However, it will increase your reading speed in the short term.
In a more focused approach, you take the time to look up and thoroughly understand each new word. In addition, to help firm up your knowledge of the word and how it is used, you make sure that you read more than one text containing that word, and you practice using it yourself. This is a slower approach in the short term, but gives you the long-term benefit of knowing and being able to use the word correctly in the future.4
Unless you are following a targeted vocabulary study program, most of the words you learn come from the text you read, and you learn the basic meaning by figuring it out from the context of the phrase. It’s estimated that we learn 7 or 8 new words each day by this method – though, as mentioned above, not all of them will stay in our long-term memory without further study.5
Whatever method you choose, we encourage you to read as much as possible, to maximize your acquisition of useful English vocabulary.
References:
1 Nation, P. & Waring, R. (1997). Vocabulary size, text coverage, and word lists. In Schmitt N, & McCarthy, M. (Eds). Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition, Pedagogy. New York: Cambridge University Press, p. 6-19.
2 The Internet TESL Journal/. ESL Vocabulary Acquisition: Target and Approach. Andrea Cervatiuc, University of Calgary.
3 Wakely, R. Good Practice in Teaching and Learning Vocabulary. Centre for Languages, Linguistics, and Area Studies. University of Southampton.
4 Nagy, W., & Anderson, R. (1984). How Many Words Are There in Printed School English?. Reading Research Quarterly. 19: 304– 330.
5 What Is the “Context” for Contextual Vocabulary Acquisition? William J. Rapaport. Center for Cognitive Science State University of New York at Buffalo.
