低頻度レベル語彙知識の測定 : 語彙教育に関する含意

概要

論文の詳細を見る
This study examines the relation between word difficulty and word frequency, focusing on university student's lexical knowledge at low-frequency levels. Close to 300 freshmen and sophomores were given a multiple-choice vocabulary test, which included 200 target words sampled from two dictionaries. The major findings are as follows: first, university students correctly answered 59.7% of the target words on a vocabulary test, which ranges from 1,000 to 14,000 word levels. Second, the percentage of correct answers is linearly related to word frequency only at high-frequency levels. Third, word difficulty loses its linear relation to word frequency at the 8,000 word level. The nonlinear relation, it is claimed in this study, is ascribable to hardly discernible differences in frequency of two adjacent words at low-frequency levels. Thus, it is suggested that a vocabulary of 8,000 word families may serve as a reasonable goal of vocabulary teaching in general courses in English.
全国英語教育学会の論文