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SUZANNE HAZENBERG, and JAN H. HULSTUN
- Defining a Minimal Receptive Second-Language Vocabulary for Non-native University Students: An Empirical Investigation
Applied Linguistics 17: 145-163.
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Defining a Minimal Receptive Second-Language Vocabulary for Non-native University Students: An Empirical Investigation
SUZANNE HAZENBERG and JAN H. HULSTUN
Very Universted Amsterdam
This study aimed to answer the question of how many words ofthe Dutch language, and which words, and adult non-native speakerneeds to know receptively in order to be able to understandfirst-year university reading materials In the first part ofthis study, and assessment was made of the representativenessof a list of 23, 550 words (lemmas), taken from a school dictionary,for a 42 million-word token corpus of contemporary written DutchIt was found that, using frequency as a criterion, text coveragesubstantially increased with up to 11, 123 words (the wordsoccurring more than 100 times in the corpus), but not beyondIn the second part of the study, an assessment was made of therepresentativeness of the same list of 23, 550 words for a relativelysmall corpus of first-year university reading materials Thepercentage of tokens covered in this small academic corpus didnot differ substantially from the percentage of tokens coveredin the big corpus analysed in the first part The third partof the study consisted of the development and administrationof a 140-item multiple-choice vocabulary test aimed at measuringtest takers' receptive knowledge of 18, 615 content words ofthe 23, 550 word list This test was administered to (i) nativespeakers entering university as freshmen, (u) non-native graduatestudents, and (III) non-native prospective students taking aDutch language entry examination test battery Extrapolationsof the test scores showed that the average vocabulary size ofthese three groups of test takers was 18, 800, 15, 800, and11, 200 respectively It is concluded that the minimal vocabularysize needed for university studies is 10, 000 base words EarlierDutch studies, suggesting that knowledge of 3, 000 or 5, 000base words would suffice, appear to have underestimated sucha minimal vocabulary
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