High frequency words, which are key to a text, must be mastered to achieve minimum levels of reading proficiency. However, knowledge about the frequency of items in a language is very limited. Given this consideration, WordSift (www.wordsift.org), a word cloud tool based on high frequency and key words can assist English as a Foreign Language…

In recent years, the use of English corpora to instruct grammar in writing classes has become increasingly popular. In English for Specific Purposes classes, such a novel approach is critically important since it not only allows teachers to achieve a profound understanding of which syntactic structures should be instructed, but it also increases…

Students in academic contexts are expected to engage with large amounts of reading and they frequently meet unknown words and phrases in those reading materials. Previous research has shown that second and foreign language learners can acquire some of the unknown vocabulary that they encounter during reading. However, these previous findings were…

Averil Coxhead is widely known for developing the Academic Word List, a list of 570 word families associated with great frequency in academic texts. This list has been particularly useful to teachers of English as a Second Language as well as independent learners in tertiary education. She has also developed a Science-based word list (Coxhead and…

This article describes the development and validation of a Vietnamese bilingual version of the Vocabulary Size Test--a test which measures written receptive vocabulary size. The test can be used to measure the English vocabulary size of Vietnamese learners of English. A learner's total vocabulary size is calculated by multiplying their test result…

Following growing interest in vocabulary acquisition, a number of researchers have proposed how learners' vocabulary knowledge can be measured both in terms of how many words they know (vocabulary size) and how well they know those words (depth of knowledge). However, most of the depth measures have addressed only a single depth aspect (often for…