how many new words per lesson

<b>Forum for the discussion of Applied Linguistics </b>

Moderators: Dimitris, maneki neko2, Lorikeet, Enrico Palazzo, superpeach, cecil2, Mr. Kalgukshi2

Stephen Jones
Posts: 1421
Joined: Sun May 18, 2003 5:25 pm

Post by Stephen Jones » Tue Feb 19, 2008 12:16 am

I'm sorry, Matty, but your figures are way out. For a start we know only of Shakespeare's active vocabulary, but it has been counted as much greater than 25,000 words.

woodcutter
Posts: 1303
Joined: Sat Jun 19, 2004 6:14 am
Location: London

Post by woodcutter » Tue Feb 19, 2008 12:32 am

As I said, the figures vary. Another reason is that you might count lexemes or words, so that run/running/runner might be three items or one. Also, perhaps in Shakespeare's time particularly I think there was no very clear barrier between French, English and Latin, and educated people would know all of them to some extent. (Not very long ago academic books would routinely launch into these languages without any gloss - thankfully this practice is dying out) And yet another reason is that we must always remember most linguists are drivel spouting humbugs making claims that they have no cause to make based on the paltry facts and methodologies they have.

(So that, Stephen, when they "discredit" certain ideas it often means very little, the answers are only blowing in the wind.)

I read somewhere that Churchill, who knew 60 000 words, probably had the largest English vocabulary ever. Who comes up with this ****?

Having written the above, I looked it up, and found this silly quiz, where teacher X has parroted some "facts".

www.llsh.univ-savoie.fr/ressourcesenlig ... uizz_1.htm - 51k

It seems to me that before speaking about these figures, we must first discuss the issues of word/lexeme (a tricky issue), "foreign words", slang, dialect and names for places, products, events and people (etc). You can't just sling all the books into the computer and do a word count.

As to "how many words in English" debates (mentioned in the quiz), archaic words and very obscure words are often included in our dictionaries, and some other languages make very free use of English for description of modern concepts, so that they might claim many of our words on top of their own. And how to count the number of words in a language-with-most-words rival like Chinese, for example?

One further rant: For commercial reasons, all course books go too fast, often way too fast, because a 30 level series would be scary. Therefore dividing numbers of words in course books up won't tell you much.

fluffyhamster
Posts: 3031
Joined: Tue Oct 26, 2004 6:57 pm
Location: UK > China > Japan > UK again

Post by fluffyhamster » Tue Feb 19, 2008 1:20 pm

Hmm, "word" may not apply so straightforwardly to Chinese, but DeFrancis seems to have done a pretty good job with the list of entries in his ABC C-E Dictionary (now in a Comprehensive version also): "It would be hard to over-praise this magnificent volume. However expensive it may seem, it's worth every penny. There's no modern Chinese to English dictionary to compare with it. Most of the entries are of more than one syllable, since one of its many strengths is the number of modern compounds, as well as the number of four-character phrases and sayings, that it includes; but it contains all relevant single characters as well, distinguishing helpfully between 'bound forms' (each of which is designated by the abbreviation bf.), which only occur in combination, and genuinely monosyllabic words. Finding characters whose pronunciation you don't know is made relatively simple in the excellent character-lists to be found at the end of the volume: arranged both by stroke-count and by radical, and including many traditional forms as well. Entries are graded in terms of frequency. Quite frankly, this is THE indispensable bilingual reference-tool for the serious student of modern Chinese, just as the Grand Ricci is for the serious student of the classical language. If you only buy one BIG dictionary, make it this one. You won't regret it." (Amazon UK review by Kevin Maynard)

I'd be suspicious of a thirty-level course. I can't see why a course couldn't be a single volume, with beginners starting unsurprisingly at the beginning, intermediates about a third to halfway through etc. Add in quality explanations in L1 and you could get rid of the expensive teacher (at least until such a time as a student will be in any position to genuinely benefit, "acquire" at least confidence, a certainty in their abilities, from no-hold chatting).
Last edited by fluffyhamster on Wed Feb 20, 2008 12:17 am, edited 1 time in total.

Stephen Jones
Posts: 1421
Joined: Sun May 18, 2003 5:25 pm

Post by Stephen Jones » Tue Feb 19, 2008 10:00 pm

The problem of course is how you count. A quick Google search gives you a figure of between 29,000 and 31,000 distinct words in Shakespeare's plays, so the OP was less off the mark than I thought, though of course the question is whether his passive vocabulary was much higher.

I suspect that one of the traits of good writers is the ability to use a large amount of their passive vocabulary, so possibly the passive vocabulary of a literary genius is actually marginally lower than that of a plodding Scrabble Player.
And yet another reason is that we must always remember most linguists are drivel spouting humbugs making claims that they have no cause to make based on the paltry facts and methodologies they have.
So much better to be an anti-intellectual prick making stupid generalizations to back them up, no?

woodcutter
Posts: 1303
Joined: Sat Jun 19, 2004 6:14 am
Location: London

Post by woodcutter » Wed Feb 20, 2008 12:45 am

I was going to mention scrabble players too, great pricks must think alike. In fact, U.S school spelling bee champions seem to have terrifying vocabularies, whereas Churchill seems notable more for breadth of knowledge, encyclopedic-dictionary-only vocabulary items.

Of course, passive/active is yet another issue.

I wouldn't consider myself anti-intellectual in the slightest, though I am against cultish intellectualism, and the seemingly growing tendency to only examine peoples' credentials and not what they actually say (and against using intellectual terms simply to show off and exclude). Anybody coming from a harder intellectual discipline would find it difficult to stomach many of the things that are published in all seriousness in the light 'n' fluffy field of applied linguistics, where there is a very weak tradition of criticism and people like David Nunan sitting at the academic summit encouraging endless hopelessly feeble experiments, which are then touted as giving genuine scientific results.

I do make big generalizations, but "woodcutter" exists to provoke debate, not to be quoted as an authority as "real linguists" are.

(This isn't a dig at fluffy, who chose his name ironically! As to the Chinese, it seems harsh to say that a single obscure character is not a "word", and then there is the severe problem of sorting out what you are going to call archaic or dialect. Thanks for the dictionary info, you never know, I might pay money for that. If you do, I'd like to know if it is really all that. With the course books, some are worse than others, but plenty go starter-basic-intermediate-postintermediate-advanced, or something like that. Regardless of how you physically divide the material given, it is too thin, and needs massive supplementation, so that in fact most students probably attempt several different series before getting to real advanced levels)

blackmagicABC
Posts: 37
Joined: Mon Feb 18, 2008 4:37 am
Location: Taiwan

Post by blackmagicABC » Fri Feb 22, 2008 6:15 pm

I am glad to see other individuals here who are not willing to get caught up in ad hominem attacks and logic.
Without specifying the level or age or mental capacity of the students it is impossible to judge the amount of words you should teach in a lesson. This is made even more difficult by not specifying the amount of hours they study or how willing they are to study and review by themselves or where they are studying.
Can you teach the same amount of vocabulary to a 15 year old in China as you would in a language program in Australia or England where there is much more opportunity to use what they have learned outside the classroom?
Ideally you should be able to reach a level of 4000 to 6000 words and the question would rather be over how many hours or years do you want to strecth the lessons.
Finally, the only "big" word I know is ad hominem which is why I used it. I have to at least sound smart.

Stephen Jones
Posts: 1421
Joined: Sun May 18, 2003 5:25 pm

Post by Stephen Jones » Sat Feb 23, 2008 11:48 pm

Finally, the only "big" word I know is ad hominem which is why I used it. I have to at least sound smart.
Err. 'ad hominem' is not a word; so you don't :)

I think the OP was clearly thinking of an EFL, not an ESL situation. A clear answer would obviously depend on a large number of factors, including some of those you've given, and also the question of how different the words are from those in L1, and whether they can be adduced from known vocabulary in the target language (Arabic formations from the three consonant root are interesting in this respect). Whilst you can't clearly guess that 'maktaba' means bookshop from knowing the three letter root 'kitab', book you're pretty close to it, as it is a regular pattern.

User avatar
Matty
Posts: 52
Joined: Wed Oct 18, 2006 6:06 pm
Location: _ Barcelona, Spain
Contact:

Post by Matty » Sun Feb 24, 2008 5:11 am

Stephen Jones wrote:I'm sorry, Matty, but your figures are way out. For a start we know only of Shakespeare's active vocabulary, but it has been counted as much greater than 25,000 words.
As Woodcutter remarked about, "...sling books into a computer and do a word count..."

...you'll find the 25,000 words is about right. How you define vocabulary is another matter, innit. Are we talking about meanings? Chair or chair? Expressions? Idioms? Phrasal verbs?

The 200 words making up around 50% of written and spoken English is correct and taken from a corpus, innit. I wish I had the reference at hand. You'll just have to take my word for it or look it up yourself, innit.

You can, course, make words up too as long as you're sure that your target audience will understand you, innit. Shakespeare had a wonderful time doing this and some of his creations have stayed with us to this day... innit!

blackmagicABC
Posts: 37
Joined: Mon Feb 18, 2008 4:37 am
Location: Taiwan

Post by blackmagicABC » Sun Feb 24, 2008 6:09 am

Stephen Jones wrote:
Finally, the only "big" word I know is ad hominem which is why I used it. I have to at least sound smart.
Err. 'ad hominem' is not a word; so you don't :)

quote]
:cry:
Back to the drawing board for me.

Stephen Jones
Posts: 1421
Joined: Sun May 18, 2003 5:25 pm

Post by Stephen Jones » Mon Feb 25, 2008 12:40 am

As I pointed out in a later post the figures for the vocabulary used in Shakespeare's plays is around 30,000 so I was a little too scathing in the first post. But, that figure is for Shakespeare's active vocabulary. There is normally a considerable difference between a speaker's active and his passive vocabulary (though I suspect the better the writer the smaller the difference on average) and we obviously have no way of finding out Shakespeare's average vocabulary.

Your 200 word figure is meaningless. Apart from anything else much depends on the type of the corpus. Stick in a load of 'you knows' and 'innits' and the frequency of the most common words increases no end. It is meaningless though for a second reason. Amongst those 200 words there will be a considerable number of articles, auxiliaries, prepositions, pronouns and other common words that may well take up two-thirds of the occurrences of the words in the list. They will however not let you gain any real insight into the meaning of the passage. In this interchange (where I have blanked out words unlikely to be in the 200 list)

"Do you often ****** ***********s?"
"Yes, I always ******** ********s and have a ********** when I go to the *************."


there are twenty words and we are aware of the meaning of 80% of them, but the passage is still completely obscure.

Here are links to a couple of articles on the matter.
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/langua ... 03976.html
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/langua ... 03993.html

woodcutter
Posts: 1303
Joined: Sat Jun 19, 2004 6:14 am
Location: London

Post by woodcutter » Mon Feb 25, 2008 2:06 am

I don't mind too much if Stephen attacks me ad hominem, we have to take the rough with the smooth, and his stuff is always worth reading. If Lorikeet starts laying into me then I'll be worried.

If you took the quiz I posted you'll have found out that you can learn 200 new words a day! But you must revise all new words every day......... :roll:

One further problem with word-counting Shakespeare's plays is that we all know a certain amount of vocab (technical stuff especially) that we would be unlikely to use in a play.

blackmagicABC
Posts: 37
Joined: Mon Feb 18, 2008 4:37 am
Location: Taiwan

Post by blackmagicABC » Mon Feb 25, 2008 6:24 am

I thought ad hominem is not a word (although it does appear in the dictionary) but I guess we could call it two words.
The brains ability to remember new information, if it is structured coreectly and memorized correctly, is much better than what we often expect or care to admit. I do think it is possible to memorize 200 words a day but that leads to some questions.
For how long. 200 words a day for a month or for a year?
In what context and are you familiar with those words or the language.
I am sure if it is required in an experiment I could memorize 200 words a day for a week. I would be able to do it if the words are in English or Afrikaans. I could probably memorise 50 to 100 words a day for a week if they are in Chinese but in any other language it would be impossible because I have no point of reference or the system of pronunciation or meaning would be unfamiliar to me.
This also assumes that we are counting each word as a "fact" and it is very possible to memorize 200 facts a day.
Whether these words would be meaningful to me in conversation is another question.
Considering that we are teaching students to read and understand spoken English it would be impossible for them to memorize that many words in a day and use or understand them in context, especially if the language is not familiar to them.
I think you are both reasoning on the extremes of this matter. That also shows why the original question is almost irrelevant as it does not allow for the analysis of the situation.
As for Shakespeare, I have no idea, no desire to research it and I don't think it is really that relevant. It would be interesting to know though so please continue.

woodcutter
Posts: 1303
Joined: Sat Jun 19, 2004 6:14 am
Location: London

Post by woodcutter » Fri Apr 18, 2008 2:30 am

A dictionary I have that was published in 1982 says Shakespeare knows 15 000 words. The bard has been boning up recently it would seem.

We (Matty) only touched lightly on perhaps the most important difficulty of all here - for example, you know the word "bit", but how many of its meanings do you know? How many points should you score for it?

Post Reply