Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Focusing questions
word frequency: simply measured by counting how often a word or word form
occurs in a large sample of spoken or written language, such as the British
National Corpus (BNC) (www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk)
Keywords
Much teaching has been based on the idea that the most frequently used words in
the target language should be taught first. Almost all beginners’ books restrict the
vocabulary they introduce in the first year to about a thousand of the most fre-
quent items. My beginners’ coursebook People and Places (Cook, 1980), for
instance, had about 950 separate words; the American course I Love English
(Capelle et al., 1985) lists about 750 words. Traditional syllabuses for language
teaching usually include lists of the most frequent words.
The French course Voix et Images de France (CREDIF, 1961) was perhaps the first
to choose its vocabulary by actually counting how often words were used by

---

native speakers. The COBUILD English Course (Willis and Willis, 1988; COBUILD
stands for ‘Collins and Birmingham University International Data Base’) similarly
bases itself on a corpus of speech. Its first lesson teaches 91 words including ‘per-
son’ and ‘secretary’, unlikely to be in the opening lessons of most coursebooks.
Now that vast collections of language are easily accessible on the computer,
counting the frequencies of words is fairly simple. The list below cites the 50 most
frequent words in the British National Corpus (BNC) sample of 100 million words.
The most frequent word ‘the’ occurs no less than 6,187,267 times and the 50th
word ‘her’ 218,258 times. The top 100 words account for 45 per cent of all the
words in the BNC; in other words, knowing 100 words would allow you at least to
recognize nearly half of the words you meet in English.
Word frequency 47