Discover why we should focus on teaching the most frequent words in English in the second of two articles by Scott Thornbury, author of Natural Grammar.
In the previous article I made a case for teaching the top 200 high-frequency words in English as soon as possible. And as thoroughly as possible. That means teaching them in their typical syntactic environments and with their common collocations. By learning these high-frequency function words, I argued, learners will be getting their grammar 'for free'. But knowing that a common word, like want, for example, takes the pattern want + NP (noun phrase) is not much use if you have no noun phrases to put into the NP slot. You may urgently want a corkscrew, but if you don't know the word for corkscrew, you will be reduced to, well, miming one. A fat lot of good your 200 high-frequency words will be if you are speaking on the phone!
So, along with the common little words, learners need a bank of 'big words', that is, words that do the informational work in speaking and writing. This is of course something we have known all along: learners need vocabulary. And as much as possible.
But what vocabulary? Short of knowing what learners' needs are (for example, aspirins), frequency may still be a useful guide. After all, the high-frequency words are highly frequent because they are used a lot. (Duh!) The top 3,000 words in English comprise something like 85% of all text. Put another way, these 3,000 words encode meanings which cover over four-fifths of what we need to say and write. In the absence of any other guidance, these might be the words to learn.
But there are problems. Does 3,000 words mean 3,000 words, or 3,000 word families? (A word family is a base word and its derivatives. So, the word family for frequency, for example, would include frequent, infrequent and frequently). And does 3,000 words mean 3,000 meanings? Clearly not, since many words in English have more than one meaning. Think of mean, for a start: don't be mean; the mean temperature; did you mean to?; he plays a mean game of dominoes...etc. Nevertheless, the 3,000 most frequent words in their most frequent forms, and only their most common meanings, might be a realistic target for most learners. In fact, at ten words a night, with breaks on Sundays, you could learn them all in a year! Where can you find a list of these words? For some bizarre reason, such a list does not exist. The nearest thing to a published frequency list is the list of what are called 'defining words'. These are the words that the dictionary writers used in compiling their definitions. In the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (OALD) you'll find them at the back: there are just under 3,000 of them. As an example of how much mileage you can get out of relatively few words, here is a Polish student describing a shopping experience(1). The words that do not occur in the OALD defining vocabulary are underlined.
A: It happened I think two years ago, I went to a shop. It was Saturday, I usually do my shopping on Saturday. So I went to a shop to buy shoes, and I went to that particular shop in which I found my pair of shoes.
B: Expensive?
A: Yeah, quite expensive.
B: How much?
A: About forty to fifty pounds, something like that. So I went there, it was full of people and I tried on the shoes that I liked, so I decided to buy them. So I bought them. I went home after that, but it was almost the end of the day, the shopping day, so it wasn't left a long time for the shops to close, so when I went home and decided to try on the shoes again, I saw that in the bag were two left shoes. So I had, well, it was quite an expensive pair of shoes, so I tried to go back to the shop and exchange them so although I knew that they will exchange them, I was a bit worried. But I was late and the shop was closed already and I had to go the next day on Sunday to get the proper pair of shoes.
B: Did you manage to get it?
A: Yes, finally.
Apart from four words, the learner has told her story using only words in the defining vocabulary. In fact, 92% of the total words she uses are in the top one thousand words in spoken English. Thus, the student (who was in an advanced class) manages to be communicatively effective using only a limited range of words. So, learners need the 200 high frequency little words, in order to express a full range of grammatical meaning, and they need another 2,000 or so big words, in order to become communicatively effective. Language learning, in other words, is essentially lexical.
1 The data comes from the research done by Ruth Gairns and Stuart Redman as preparation for natural English and is reprinted with their permission.