Vocabulary Acquisition

The process of learning the  words of a language.

Vocabulary size

How does your vocab grow this big?

Between the ages of 1 and 2 years, most children will learn less than one word a day (Fenson et al., 1994), whilst a 17-year-old will learn about 10,000 new words per year, mostly from reading (Nagy and Herman, 1987). 

From two until about six years old, the average rate of acquisition is estimated to be five or more words a day. Many of the new words for a native English speaker are verbs and adjectives.

• Words are not instantaneously acquired, for second language learners. They are gradually learned over a period of time from numerous exposures. Vocabulary acquisition occurs in two ways. . . . Being able to understand a word is known as receptive knowledge and is normally connected with listening and reading. If we are able to produce a word of our own accord when speaking or writing, then that is considered productive knowledge . . . . 

But

I can speak English … why the vocab work?

• The most frequent 1,000 words in spoken English provide coverage of 94% of the running words in informal conversation.

• The first 1,000 words of English cover 74% of written text. But …

Chatting to friends and reading everyday text is not at the level of academic vocabulary.

Confirmation – not this … this

http://conc.lextutor.ca/list_learn/eng/

• http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/r21270/levels/index.htmlClick on the 0001 – 1000 link in the top left corner. Take a quick look through the list. Use the dictionary to check word definitions of any words you don’t understand.

• Repeat for 1001 – 2000. Then take a quiz. You must get three quizzes at 10/10 to move on. (Take a screen snap of each completed quiz as evidence of your score.)

• Another useful test: http://www.lextutor.ca/tests/levels/recognition/1_14k/

Vocab list

Quiz list Quiz menu

Button for

dictionary

definitions

Click on word to enter it

into dictiona

ry

Academic Vocabulary

Click on the UWL link in the top left corner. Go through the list. Use the dictionary to check word definitions of any words you don’t understand. Complete all 12 quizzes. (UWL = university/academic word list)

More practice, but different practice.

http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/r21270/levels/index.htmlType in the link above. Depending on how you did on the previous quizzes start at a lower level, or go straight to the University Word List challenge.Finished early? Try this test: http://www.angelfire.com/ok5/jwalters/prereceptivelevels.html and thishttp://www.lextutor.ca/tests/associates/

Common Phrases

• http://www.lextutor.ca/tests/levels/recognition/phrasal/