I love the roundabout ways I come across language learning articles. This blog post was shared by the Linguist List facebook page, which normally posts more formal information like conference calls and job listings. The blog itself is about the gap in difficulty between having a conversation with a native speaker of the L2 one is studying and being able to understand native speakers of the L2 speaking amongst themselves. The site appears to be created by someone whose primary background is in math, so the author takes a numerical approach. These were the passages I thought were really interesting (emphasis added): It doesn’t matter if you’re looking at English or French or Japanese — every natural language follows a power law distribution, which means that the frequency of every word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. In other words, the 1000th most common word appears twice as often as the 2000th most common word, and four times as often as the 4000th most common word, and so on. This is the hard part about focusing strictly on the frequency of the word when creating a curriculum or assessing how many words to teach to reach a certain level of fluency. Function words compose so much of our language but convey relatively little content, so to say that with a few hundred words a person can understand "the majority" of words in use doesn't necessarily mean they could understand whole passages.
I still advocate emphasizing high-frequency words at beginning stages of learning, especially common verbs, at least in a language like Spanish where verbs communicate so much meaning and cognates and proper nouns work to fill in the blanks. But this post is good to share with intermediate level students who may get discouraged or not understand the paradox of continuing to progress while feeling like they've plateaued. I also think it underscores the importance of literacy and encouraging copious amounts of reading and listening--as words get rarer, only by increasing the exposure to input will students accumulate the repetitions necessary to acquire more advanced vocabulary. It may be tempting to suggest targeted vocabulary practice, but without contextualized presentation, we lose out on the collocations and subtle shades of meaning that would go further in increasing comprehension of natural conversation.
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AuthorThis is a place where I record thoughts on second language research and pedagogical theory Archives
June 2019
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