Using the Oxford 3000 to boost your students vocabulary

As teachers, we are used to our students asking us What are the words we really need to know?. They realize that some words are more important than others, and seem to know instinctively that knowing these words will help them to learn efficiently. One of the keys to knowing which words to learn, and in what order, is frequency. When we look at a text, in any language, one of the first things we notice is how easy or difficult it is to understand; and the main factor in assessing the difficulty of a text is not grammar, but whether the words in it are known to us or not. Look at this text: I was out with some friends in London and we were on a train. We were getting off the train, and half of us had got off, when the doors closed! I ran to the door but didnt get there in time. People on our side were pressing the open button, and so were people outside the train, and Tom shouted down the platform, Open up! but nothing happened... and compare it with this one: Timbre is now understood to have two broad characteristics that contribute to the perception of music: (a) it is a multifarious set of abstract sensory attributes, some of which are continuously varying (for instance, attack, sharpness, brilliance, nasality), others of which are discrete or categorical, and (b) it is one of the primary perceptual vehicles for the recognition, identification and tracking over time of a sound source. A teacher would say that the vocabulary load in the first text is much lighter than in the second text. Why is this? Well, one of the main reasons is that the second text contains words which occur much less frequently. If you were preparing a vocabulary syllabus, you would have to make choices about the order in which to present the words. Which words would you present first: words like friend and train, or words like timbre and sensory? The answer, obviously, is the words which occur more frequently. Lets look at why this is the case. To do this, we first need to consider the idea of frequency and how we measure it.

When we say that a word is frequent, we mean that it is used more often in the language than other words which are less frequent. We measure frequency by looking at a sample of language called a corpus. A corpus is a collection of text, usually held on a computer, which we can analyse in order to obtain information about the language in general. When we are writing dictionaries, one of the things we use corpus for is to analyse how a word behaves in context so that we can give information about collocation and grammar patterns, and to help us write example sentences. You may have heard about this aspect of corpus. But what we are interested in here is getting information about how frequent a word is. Our corpus programs allow us to generate frequency lists which show the words in the corpus in order of frequency, with the most frequent at the top and becoming less and less frequent as we go down the list. Here are the top twelve words from the frequency list. (The numbers show the numbers of times that the word appears in the corpus.) the be of and to a in that have it I for 5976498 3557210 3017772 2621951 2551312 2154024 1900782 1193673 1129193 1054848 897073 856455

You will notice that there is a dramatic difference in frequency between the items at the top of the list, but the further down the list we go, the closer together their frequencies become. So that means that the top words make up a huge proportion of what we actually say and write. The, at the top, makes up around 7% of any text or conversation.

But why bother with wordlists anyway? Well, learners always want to know: How many words do we need to learn? and What are they?. Our research shows very clearly that teachers and students think that knowing which words are more frequent gives a big advantage when it comes to learning vocabulary. And, in fact, applied linguistics research shows that they are right. It all comes down to the fact, obvious in a way, that some words are far more frequent, and therefore far more useful, than others. As we saw, one word, the, makes up 7% of all words in an average text. The most common ten words make up about 24% of an average text, even more in the spoken language. It is clear from this that 3000 words will make up a very large proportion of what we speak and write. The implications for vocabulary teaching are quite far-reaching. It does not mean that we can just teach 3000 words and that will be enough for our students; but it does mean that we must give priority to teaching the high frequency words above words which are lower frequency. The conclusion which these figures lead us to, then, is that concentrating our efforts on a restricted list of the most frequent 3000 words is a good investment of time and energy, as it will allow us to understand a very high proportion of the words in a text. This is what we have done in the Seventh edition of the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary (OALD). We have produced a vocabulary list which can be used by students at most levels. The keywords of the Oxford 3000 have been carefully selected by a group of language experts and experienced teachers as the words which should receive priority in vocabulary study because of their importance and usefulness. The selection is based on three criteria. The first strand is corpus frequency, of course: how common the word is overall. Frequency is a very important factor in how important a word is for learners to know, as we have already seen. So, the words which occur most frequently in English are included, based on the information in our corpus collection. Most frequency-based word lists stop there they are based purely on word counts. This has disadvantages, however. it may be that the word is used very frequently, but only in a narrowly defined area, such as newspapers or scientific articles. So in order to avoid including these restricted words, we include as keywords only those words which

are frequent across a range of different types of text. In other words, keywords are both frequent and used in a variety of contexts. In addition, the list includes some very important words which happen not to be used frequently, even though they are very familiar to most users of English. This list of lowfrequency but important words includes, perhaps surprisingly, words for parts of the body (such as chest and stomach), words to do with human relationships (such as boyfriend and aunt), and words which are useful for explaining what you mean when you do not know the exact word for something (such as liquid and powder). These words were identified by consulting a panel of over seventy experts in the fields of teaching and language study to find out which of these low-frequency words they considered to be most important for students learning. The words which the panel considered essential are invariably words which have a very basic meaning, which cannot be expressed in any other way. It is difficult to imagine being able to function in English without some of these words. As well as the words I have already mentioned, they include words for domestic objects and activities (shower, stairs, cupboard), words to do with emotions (ashamed, jealous, grateful), and words to do with food, drink and cooking (cheese, chocolate, spoon). Perhaps surprisingly, a few function words are not all that frequent, including some possessive pronouns (hers, ours, theirs). These are all words which do not fulfil the frequency criteria but are included in the Oxford 3000 because they are important for students to know. They are useful words because they are the words that a learner needs in order to explain something that he or she does not have the vocabulary for. And for the same reason they are also important for dictionary-makers, because they are words which are essential for writing definitions. In order to make the definitions in this dictionary easy to understand, we have written them using the keywords of the Oxford 3000. All words used in normal definition text are keywords. The words of the Oxford 3000 are shown in the main section of the dictionary in larger print, and with a key symbol immediately following. The entries for keywords often have extra information in the form of more examples of use, special notes explaining synonyms or related words, or helpful illustrations. This means that the keywords make an excellent starting point for expanding your vocabulary. With most keywords, there is far more to learn about them than the first meaning in the entry: often these words have

many meanings, have a large family of words derived from them, or are used in a variety of patterns. All of this means that each one of the keywords repays close study. Of course, a vocabulary of 3000 words will not be sufficient for anyone who is hoping to progress beyond intermediate level. In order to function at an academic or professional level, learners need to equip themselves with a certain amount of specialized vocabulary, the exact nature of which will depend on their academic or professional interests. For this reason we have included extra lists of 250 words each, which will give more specialist coverage in three areas that students are likely to be interested in. These are: arts, sciences, and business and finance. These lists cover the next most important words to learn after the Oxford 3000 for those who are interested in one of these fields. The lists are based on analyses of specialist corpora and include the next most frequent words after the keywords of the Oxford 3000. The Oxford 3000 is designed to be used by teachers, syllabus planners, materials writers and test writers. But in particular it will be students who will benefit from using the list. There are three ways that students can use the Oxford 3000. Firstly, they can use it to revise. It makes an excellent checklist to make sure that they know all the words on the list, the most frequent and useful words of English. Secondly, they can use it to extend their knowledge of keywords. It is important to know high-frequency words well. Students may think that they already know all there is to know about these words, but a glance at a dictionary entry will show that there is more to a word than its basic meaning. Students should be aware that Oxford 3000 words often have several meanings and are often used in idioms, as part of phrasal verbs, in common collocations, and in particular grammatical patterns. And thirdly, they can use it to expand their vocabulary using the Oxford 3000 as a springboard. The Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary contains a large number of notes, illustrations and cross-references which students can use to build up their word knowledge beyond the words in the list. For example, notes in the dictionary group together words with related meanings. At the entry for break, an Oxford 3000 keyword, the note in the blue panel lists word which have similar meanings to break, but which will often be more appropriate for a particular context. So, how can you help your students to make use of this resource to learn the items on the Oxford 3000 list, and then to use the Oxford 3000 to progress beyond the

intermediate plateau? The final part of this article looks at some ways teachers can make use of the Oxford 3000 in the classroom. Many of these ideas are exploited in the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary Resource Book, which contains photocopiable exercises and activities for use in the classroom. First of all, research shows that repetition on its own is not very effective so there is not much point in just reading the list passively. Most researchers say that the learner needs to engage with the word in some way in order to learn it effectively. One easy way of doing this would be to get your students to use the word in written sentences, then get them to read them aloud to each other (reading aloud is a more effective way of memorizing than silent reading). For example, tell them to write a sentence with landscape, then read it aloud to their neighbour. The sentence should be as personal as possible to make it more memorable. Another way to engage with the word is for students to make decisions about the word. This could involve categorizing, ranking, and sequencing. For example, give them a list of words (qualification, worship, term, federal, court, prayer, party, illegal) and get them to put them into the following categories: law, politics, education, religion. You could also get them to arrange words in order of size, for example spider, mouse, cat, cow, or in time order, for example baby, child, teenager, adult. It often helps to associate words with a mental image. This is quite easy for real-world objects, like flower or arrow but it can also be extended to abstract ones. For example, what image might you associate with dangerous? Again, this could be adapted as a classroom activity: One student draws a picture to represent a particular word, while the other students try to guess what the word is. Different students will of course have different learning styles so you should allow learners to organize their own vocabulary learning where this is practical. So for example, students could make their own choice of words to learn from the Oxford 3000 and compare the words that they have chosen with the words that other students have chosen, telling their partner the reasons for their choice to give it a more personal and memorable touch. Another way of making words memorable is to choose a few apparently unrelated words and try to relate them in some way.

For example, how would you relate emergency and pepper? You could write a sentence, or just think of an idea. A more extended version of this would be to give students between five and ten words and ask them to write a story, perhaps in groups, incorporating all of the words. It does not particularly matter if the resulting story is not very logical or coherent the personal involvement should help to make the words used more memorable. Some other quick and easy ways of making vocabulary more memorable by engaging with it include anagrams, word searches, and word strings. Examples of these can be found in the OALD Resource Book. We have been talking about ways of making the process of learning vocabulary more meaningful by maximizing the students involvement, but there is still a lot to be said for list-learning. For example bilingual wordlists are an effective way of summarizing meaning and an economical way of learning. Different estimates have put the number of words that can be learnt in this way at 50 words in a week, or even 30 words in an hour. It would seem to be perfectly possible to learn 3000 words in this way in less than a year. Of course, students will not learn all there is to know about each word by learning in this way. But it always takes a number of encounters with the word before it is learnt anyway, so memorizing it along with its translation is not such a bad idea. It is also useful for self-testing: students cover up one half of the pair, either the English word or the translation, and try to remember the other half. The Oxford 3000 list has been specially designed to be used with the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary. For more information on the Oxford 3000, visit the OALD website at http://www.oup.com/elt/oald, where you can also download an electronic copy of the list which you can then manipulate to create your own exercises and learning resources. I hope that this will encourage dictionary users and not-yet dictionary users to realize the wonderful resource material that is contained in our dictionaries.