I'm A Proud TESLer (and a Proud Muslim too)! X'D

In the name of Allah, Most Knowledgeable.

Yesterday, I helped Averil Coxhead and Bali (I think this is how you spell his name) with their research on a new method (which I have vague idea for what, since I didn't get the opportunity to enquire Ave) to use the Vocabulary Size Test developed by Paul Nation and his colleagues.

Maybe I should describe a bit about what this Vocabulary Size Test is all about.


What is this Vocabulary Size Test?
A Vocabulary Size Test is a test used to measure an individual's vocabulary knowledge. In this test, vocabulary is divided into groups of thousands depending on their level of difficulty and frequency of appearance in text, both spoken and written.

What is a 'Word'?
The term 'Word' can have different meaning depending on how words are counted. When we count words, we often use these terms: Tokens, types and word families.

Tokens: Tokens are sometimes referred as running words. A token is a word in a text, so "The most difficult thing about the course was staying awake during lectures." contains 12 words. It is the as the "wordcount" function in Microsoft Word.

Types: Word types refer to the number of different words in a text, so if the same word occurs two or more times, it is only counted once. Using the previous example, "The most difficult thing about the course was staying awake during lectures." only has 11 word types because the word the occurred two times.

Word families: A word family consists of a headword, its inflected forms, and closely derived related forms. An example word family for the headword agree: agree, agreed, agreeing, agreement, agreements, agrees, agreeable, agreeably, disagreeably, disagreements, disagree, disagreed, disagreeing, disagreement, disagrees. Word families can contain different parts of speech. This knowledge of word families is what measured in the Vocabulary Size test.

How do we know a word is difficult or not?
In general, vocabulary can be divided into 4 types, they are: The high frequency vocabulary, the low frequency vocabulary, technical vocabulary, and the academic wordlist.

The first 2000 words are considered the high frequency words as they occur most frequently in text, representing about 80% to 90% of the language in text. They comprise of function words (such as articles, prepositions and pronouns) and content words (such as nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs), which are vital to understanding a text.

The next 1000 group (3000-level vocabulary) is listed under the academic vocabulary. Out of this 1000 words, there are 570 words (such as accumulate, income, and sequence) classified as most important in order to be able to understand academic subjects.

Any vocabulary falls into the 4000-level onwards, they are considered as low frequency vocabulary which made up of most English words. Findings of many research papers (mostly by Paul Nation) found out that university students need to know around 5000 to 6000 word families to do an undergraduate degree, and around 9000 word families for PhD students.

Lastly is the technical vocabulary. Technical vocabulary consists of words used in one area that are not so common outside of that area. Technical words can be of high frequency, low frequency, and even the academic words depending on the specified field. Example: blend, sear, whisk and dice are technical terms for culinary.


Okay, I think I provided enough insights about Vocabulary Size Test and related FAQ (yeah, right! :'P) regarding vocabulary.

So, did I do well in the test?

You bet I did! *grin*

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. . . my score was 13, 800 word families! *claps*

That, my friend, is big enough of vocabulary size for someone too lazy to do his readings and rarely read novels (but plays countless RPG-based games. Heh!).

Here is the "certificate" for getting over 10,000 words achievement:




And I remember Ave said this:

"With this level of vocabulary, you can already teach vocabulary!"


Thank you, Ave! I know it was just a compliment and motivator for me and others who scored above 10K (because I realise there are still a lot of things for me to master in order to be able to teach either vocabulary or grammar) but that very compliment really made my day.

Why, you ask?

Simply because, now I know that I'm on the right path to be an English teacher! I'm proud to be a TESLer, and I'm even prouder because I'm a Muslim.


"O Allah, the Beneficient! Belong to Thee all Knowledge and Wisdom, of whatever is in the Heavens and the Earth. Praise be to Thee, the Glorious, the Exalted in Power! Expand my chest and make easy my affair and remove the impediment from my speech in order that they may understand what I say."