It is more likely that the average educated native speaker has a vocabulary of around 17,000 base words and has acquired them at the average rate of about two to three words per day.

– How large can a receptive vocabulary be?

… If we take 98% as the ideal coverage, a 8,000–9,000 word-family vocabulary is needed for dealing with written text, and 6,000–7,000 families for dealing with spoken text.

– How much input do you need to learn the most frequent 9000 words?

Like the 14th century monastery within its pages, The Name of the Rose has a forbidding façade or beginning. For example, on the second page of Prologue, we find text in the form of; verta analecta, sive collection veterum aliquat opera … That notwithstanding, many have devoured it even if that required a laborious process of referencing.

Even a native speaker of the language would not have been able to read the book without references. Some say that writing has to be clear and readily accessible. One such person is Steven Pinker who wrote The Sense of Style and who for example says, writing “succeeds when it aligns with the truth, the proof of success being clarity and simplicity”.

So, how is it that The Name of the Rose sold over fifty million copies (medievalists.net)? Pinker himself has the answer, which is, “the writer’s goal is to satisfy the reader’s need”. This is why students are asked to consider Purpose, Audience, Context and Culture at the pre-writing stage.

In some situations, clarity and brevity are required for transparency. An example of this is newspaper articles. In some situations, the reader wants a mystery to solve and the writer’s goal is to perplex with a different type of prose. For example, in one of Proust’s works, one sentence reads:

Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a previous existence must be after reincarnation; the subject of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me free to apply myself to it or not; and at the same time my sight would return and I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for my eyes, but even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, something dark indeed.

Looking at some examples of submissions to some creative writing competitions, it might occur to a casual observer that the criteria for selection is a piece’s ability to obscure.

Some may think that without demonstration of ability to use low frequency words, it will be difficult to stand out. Yasunari Kawabata who won the Nobel Prize for Literature shows that this is not true. There are others like, Umberto Eco whose works such as Foucault’s Pendulum are not as easy to swallow. One way of thinking about this is that, if a story is to be written from the heart and someone somewhere must have already observed that the best fiction springs from the heart, writing must be enjoyed. Writing is an interaction with words. Different people enjoy interacting differently. Also, simple words can be used in a not so simple way.

All this is to say, when to use simple words or low frequency words and when to write simply or not so simply are not settled questions. This matters because a student will have to know the standards required; for instance, how many words should one know before being deemed as a proficient or advanced user of a language?

What does it mean to know a word anyway? This was the question posed by Paul Nation and his colleagues who were trying to understand the “size of the vocabulary learning task” facing a non-native speaker learning a language from scratch.

Knowing according to them can mean the following things. The user is able to recognise the word – I have seen this word before and know what it means. The user is somewhat familiar with the word – I have seen this word and know the meaning somewhat or perhaps I have seen the word but I am not sure what it means. The user is able to pronounce and spell the word and knows its meaning or is able to do so without knowing its meaning. The user is able to recall the word for use in context, when necessary, say in a composition.

So, knowing, refers to 4 aspects: knowing the meaning, spelling, pronunciation and being able to use it in writing and speech.

Paul Nation also attempted to answer the previous question on standards. He cites research that a reader needs to know about 98% of vocabulary in a text to be able to understand it at a sufficient level. He qualified this by citing Carver (1994) and Kurnia (2003) who pointed out that in certain cases, even 98% coverage is not enough.

He conducted research to find out how many words a user needs to know before being able to read most texts without reference to a dictionary.

He found that number to be around 9000. This 9000 refers to 9000 word-families. A word family is a base word together with all its prefixes and suffixes. For example, run, runner and running and every other variation of ‘run’ would be considered part of 1 word family.

Nation went on to research how many books one might have to read to acquire these 9000 word families in a manageable way. The way in which reading helps to acquire these 9000 word families is through repeatedly encountering them in texts. Webb (2007a, 2007b) as cited in Nation (2014) found that a learner must encounter a word in context at least 10 times to be able to really know it in all the ways mentioned earlier. Nation (2014) found that to encounter these 9000 words around 12 times (he considers 12 safer than 10) one could read the following novels:

Adam Bede, Alice in Wonderland, Animal Farm, Babbit, Born in Exile, Captain Blood, Castle Rackrent, Cranford, Emma, Far from the Madding Crowd, Glimpses of the Moon, Great Gatsby, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lord Jim, Main Street, Master of Ballantrae, Middlemarch, More William, Right Ho Jeeves, Scaramouche, Tono Bungay, Turn of the Screw, Ulysses, Walden and Water Babies.

It should be noted that some books on the list require more than vocabulary to understand.

He also found that to encounter these 9000 word families at least 12 times, one had to be reading at least 1 hour and 40 minutes a day, assuming a reading speed of 150 words per minute. He is of the view that this is a very manageable rate. This would allow acquisition of around 1000 word families a year. 

Just reading a few books would allow a student to encounter a high frequency word sufficient times. When it comes to low frequency words such as “chagrin” (Nation, 2014), many more books would have to be read for sufficient repeated exposure.

While, primary school children of today may not be as keen on the types of stories on this list, the following is applicable to acquire sufficient vocabulary knowledge.

• 1.5 hours a day can be spent reading (rounding off 1 hour and 40 minutes)
• Books must be at the right reading level (2 unfamiliar words on a random page)
• Unfamiliar words must be looked up (online dictionaries or Kindle’s one touch look-up)
• Students must begin to understand the function of affixes (eg. ness or ly – Dawson et al., 2021)

We see more when we see it more.

The Brain Dojo