Article

Contextual learning of L2 lexical and grammatical collocations with and without typographic enhancement

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Abstract

Multiple repetitions of collocations in second language (L2) reading produce gains in collocational knowledge. However, it is less clear how typographic enhancement affects the learning of different types of L2 collocations through reading. The present experiment investigated contextual learning of English lexical (verb + noun) and grammatical (preposition + noun) collocations by Chinese speakers over two days. We manipulated the learning conditions by bolding or not bolding multiple instances of the target collocations in reading texts. A cued-recall (gapfill) post-test was used to measure collocational knowledge. We observed greater accuracy of responses with grammatical (but not lexical) collocations when the collocations were bolded than when they were not bolded. We argue that bolding likely made prep + noun collocations more perceptually salient to the learners during reading. We conclude that contextual learning of L2 grammatical collocations is likely to benefit from drawing explicit attention to the whole expressions in written input.

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... For instance, Uchihara et al.'s (2019) meta-analysis of 45 effect sizes from 26 studies found a medium effect (r = .34) of repetition on incidental vocabulary learning. Such attention-drawing techniques are presumed to lead to the promotion of both 'depth of processing' and higher engagement with the target items on the grounds that learners' attention is explicitly (or directly) drawn to the enhanced items, and hence making them more perceptually salient and noticeable (Altamimi & Conklin, 2023;Puimège et al., 2024;Toomer et al., 2024). In fact, a handful of studies in recent years have focused on the effect of awareness-raising on the processing and/or learning of collocations from the written (and spoken) input through both offline, online (i.e., eye-movement), and text-audio synchronization procedures (e.g., Altamimi & Conklin, 2023;Boers, Demecheleer, et al., 2017;Boers, Eyckmans, et al., 2006;Choi, 2017;Jung & Lee, 2023;Jung et al., 2024;Majuddin et al., 2021;Puimège et al., 2024;Sonbul & Schmitt, 2013;Szudarski & Carter, 2016;Toomer & Elgort, 2019;Toomer et al., 2024;Tuzcu, 2023;Vu & Peters, 2022. ...
... Such attention-drawing techniques are presumed to lead to the promotion of both 'depth of processing' and higher engagement with the target items on the grounds that learners' attention is explicitly (or directly) drawn to the enhanced items, and hence making them more perceptually salient and noticeable (Altamimi & Conklin, 2023;Puimège et al., 2024;Toomer et al., 2024). In fact, a handful of studies in recent years have focused on the effect of awareness-raising on the processing and/or learning of collocations from the written (and spoken) input through both offline, online (i.e., eye-movement), and text-audio synchronization procedures (e.g., Altamimi & Conklin, 2023;Boers, Demecheleer, et al., 2017;Boers, Eyckmans, et al., 2006;Choi, 2017;Jung & Lee, 2023;Jung et al., 2024;Majuddin et al., 2021;Puimège et al., 2024;Sonbul & Schmitt, 2013;Szudarski & Carter, 2016;Toomer & Elgort, 2019;Toomer et al., 2024;Tuzcu, 2023;Vu & Peters, 2022. ...
... In most of the studies in which traditional (offline) measures of explicit collocational knowledge (e.g., form recognition, form recall, and/or meaning recall) were mostly or exclusively used to measure learning gains (e.g., Boers, Demecheleer, et al., 2017;Sonbul & Schmitt, 2013;Szudarski & Carter, 2016;Toomer & Elgort, 2019;Toomer et al., 2024;Vu & Peters, 2022; but see especially Puimège et al., 2024;Szudarski & Carter, 2016;Toomer et al., 2024), results overall seem to attest to greater learning gains accrued from the input enhancement of collocations. To give an example, Sonbul and Schmitt (2013) carried out a study (Experiment 2) with 43 ESL advanced postgraduate students from different L1 backgrounds at a British university in which 15 intact medical collocations (vanishing lung) were used in three conditions: enriched input (3 occurrences of each collocation), enhanced (red, bold), and decontextualized (direct, outof-context instruction of collocations for memorizing). ...
... To facilitate L2 collocation learning, some studies have further incorporated focus-on-form techniques such as input enhancement (Choi, 2017;Szudarski & Carter, 2016;Toomer et al., 2024) or glossing (Peters, 2012;Toomer & Elgort, 2019). ...
... To facilitate incidental L2 collocation learning, researchers have extensively explored the pedagogical efficacy of focus-on-form techniques such as input enhancement (Choi, Incidental collocation learning from task-based reading 6 2017; Szudarski & Carter, 2016;Toomer et al., 2024) or glossing (Peters, 2012;Toomer & Elgort, 2019). These techniques aim to promote learners' attention to the enhanced collocations, as reflected in learners' eye movements (Choi, 2017;Jung et al., 2022;Majuddin et al., 2021;Puimѐge et al., 2021) and learning gains (Sonbul & Schmidt, 2013;Szudarski & Carter, 2016;Toomer & Elgort, 2019;Vu & Peters, 2022a. ...
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This study explored how to promote incidental collocation learning from task-based reading. In this study, 101 Cantonese speakers read three English texts that contained 12 target collocations. Playing a role as an editor of a magazine, participants were asked to determine if the three texts were acceptable to be published in the next issue. While half of the participants (– Guidance, n = 50) were asked to simply accept or reject the texts after reading, the other half (+ Guidance, n = 51) received task guidance that contained a list of specific reviewing criteria. Participants’ eye-movements were recorded during the editor task, and 10 participants from each condition were asked to produce stimulated recalls while viewing their eye-movements. The rest of the participants’ (n = 81) knowledge about the target collocations was measured with form recall and recognition tests immediately and two weeks after the task. The results revealed that task guidance led to greater fixation durations and counts on the target collocations, as well as improved performances in the immediate posttest. The stimulated recalls further indicated that task guidance encouraged more goal-oriented reading. The findings underscore the importance of careful task design to promote incidental collocation learning from reading.
... Another technique that is known to affect attention to novel vocabulary in reading is the use of typographic enhancement, such as bolding or underlining. Typographic enhancement has been shown to facilitate contextual learning of MWEs (El-Dakhs et al., 2021;Sonbul & Schmitt, 2013;Toomer & Elgort, 2019), especially less perceptually salient types, such as grammatical collocations (Toomer, Elgort, & Coxhead, 2024), presumably because it draws learners' attention to the whole MWE during reading, which is otherwise easy to miss. Thus, typographic enhancement may boost the positive effect of definitions in contextual learning of less perceptually salient types of MWEs, such as figurative phrasal verbs (e.g., "hold up," "figure out"). ...
... PVs consist of a verb and a particle, similar to grammatical collocations which consist of a content word and a preposition. Toomer et al. (2024) who investigated the effects of typographic enhancement on contextual learning of lexical (verb + noun) and grammatical (preposition + noun) collocations found that typographic enhancement was more effective for the learning of grammatical collocations. They argued that using typographic enhancement may have made grammatical collocations more perceptually salient as a whole expression during reading for the learners. ...
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A common way of acquiring multiword expressions is through language input, such as during reading and listening. However, this type of learning is slow. Identifying approaches that optimize learning from input, therefore, is an important language-learning endeavor. In the present study, 85 learners of English as a foreign language read short texts with 42 figurative English phrasal verbs, repeated three times. In a counterbalanced design, we manipulated access to definitions (before text, after text, no definition) and typographic enhancement (with bolding, without bolding). The learning was measured by immediate and delayed gap-fill and meaning generation posttests. All posttests showed that learning with definitions was better than without, and that access to definitions after reading was more beneficial than before reading. Typographic enhancement effectively promoted con-textual learning of phrasal verbs and increased the learning advantage associated with presenting definitions after reading.
... Another technique that is known to affect attention to novel vocabulary in reading is the use of typographic enhancement, such as bolding or underlining. Typographic enhancement has been shown to facilitate contextual learning of MWEs (El-Dakhs et al., 2021;Sonbul & Schmitt, 2013;Toomer & Elgort, 2019), especially less perceptually salient types, such as grammatical collocations (Toomer, Elgort, & Coxhead, 2024), presumably because it draws learners' attention to the whole MWE during reading, which is otherwise easy to miss. Thus, typographic enhancement may boost the positive effect of definitions in contextual learning of less perceptually salient types of MWEs, such as figurative phrasal verbs (e.g., "hold up," "figure out"). ...
... PVs consist of a verb and a particle, similar to grammatical collocations which consist of a content word and a preposition. Toomer et al. (2024) who investigated the effects of typographic enhancement on contextual learning of lexical (verb + noun) and grammatical (preposition + noun) collocations found that typographic enhancement was more effective for the learning of grammatical collocations. They argued that using typographic enhancement may have made grammatical collocations more perceptually salient as a whole expression during reading for the learners. ...
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https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/139807/1/WeakInterface.pdf
Article
This research compares the outcomes of two computer-assisted second language (L2) idiom learning conditions: deliberate and contextual. Low-intermediate proficiency Japanese learners of English studied 36 idioms online by either using flashcards or reading them in sentences with contextual clues to their meanings over three learning sessions. Posttest results of these two learning conditions were compared with each other and with a baseline condition in which no learning occurred. In an idiom translation posttest, L2 participants showed superior declarative knowledge of the idioms learned in the flashcard condition. Nondeclarative knowledge gains were measured on a self-paced reading (SPR) task validated in a pilot study with 60 native (L1) readers. Although the idioms primed semantic probes during reading for the L1 participants, this was not the case for the L2 learners. Nevertheless, the two learning conditions had some positive effects on the semantic probes compared to the baseline. The finding that participants had fluent access to the idioms’ figurative meanings while reading the semantic probes is particularly important for the flashcard condition because it suggests that this learning approach results in knowledge relevant in real-time language use.
Chapter
Among ordinary language learners, the acquisition of vocabulary has long been felt to be a crucial component of learning a foreign language. Second Language Vocabularly Acquisition has the goal of comparing the effectiveness of the direct learning of vocabulary (through memorization) and the indirect learning of vocabulary (through context); it encourages an appropriate balance between direct and indirect teaching of vocabulary in second language classrooms. The authors of these original articles present theoretical background, empirical research, and case studies focusing on a variety of modes of vocabulary acquisition. There is also an exploration of relevant pedagogical issues, including a description of practical strategies and techniques for teaching vocabulary.
Article
Sonbul and Schmitt (2013) showed that exposure to second language (L2) collocations in reading texts can produce gains in explicit knowledge, but they found no evidence of gains in implicit knowledge. This study is a conceptual replication and extension of Sonbul and Schmitt's research. Sixty‐two advanced English as a second language (ESL) speakers read texts containing repeated occurrences of low‐frequency medical collocations in three sessions over 2 days. The incidental learning treatments included reading only (no typographic enhancement), bolding, and bolding‐plus‐glossing. Collocational knowledge was assessed in tests of explicit knowledge (cued recall, form recognition) and a test of implicit knowledge (primed lexical decision). Repeated exposure to bolded collocations produced greater explicit knowledge than repeated exposure to typographically unenhanced collocations. Evidence of implicit knowledge development was observed in the unenhanced (reading only) treatment but not in the remaining treatments. These results replicated Sonbul and Schmitt's findings for explicit knowledge and extended their findings for implicit knowledge. Open Practices This article has been awarded an Open Materials badge. All materials are publicly accessible via the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/qy2c3. Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki.
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Article
Collocation in language can generally be described from two dominating theoretical: (a) a frequency-based approach focusing on the habitual co-occurrence of two or more words in natural language use and the identification of such co-occurrence on statistical grounds; and (b) a phraseological approach focusing on collocations as word combinations governed by semantic aspects, such as idiomaticity and restricted substitutability.
Article
It is now generally accepted that advanced learners of English need to have command of a wide range of complex lexical units, which are for a native speaker processed as prefabncated chunks, fixed, or semi-fixed expressions However, although there has been an increasing amount written about the role of phraseology in second language acquisition, there remains a lack of detailed descnption of learners' phraseological performance as the basis for understanding how phraseological competence develops This paper addresses certain current issues in the description of collocations in English, and, in discussing the major approaches to the linguistic description of prefabricated language, the need for detailed categorization is emphasized, particularly for those interested in the development of this component of proficiency in a second language Data is presented from native speaker language use, illustrating what can be revealed by one such descriptive model Finally, the findings of a number of studies of native and non-native academic writing in English are discussed
Article
The study investigated L2 learners' acquisition of verb-noun and adjective-noun collocations following two kinds of instruction: input flood only and input flood plus input enhancement (in the form of underlining). L1 Polish learners of English as a foreign language were exposed to infrequent collocations embedded in stories that were read during three consecutive weeks. Their collocational competence was subsequently assessed in a battery of delayed tests tapping into productive and receptive levels of collocational mastery. Input flood plus input enhancement resulted in the acquisition of collocations but only at the level of form recall and form recognition. The findings are discussed with reference to the complexity of acquiring and measuring L2 collocational knowledge. The article concludes with implications for instructed second language acquisition.Badanie dotyczyło przyswajania kolokacji czasownikowo-rzeczownikowych i przymiotnikowo-rzeczownikowych przez uczących się drugiego języka na skutek dwóch różnych form nauczania: zwiększonego wkładu językowego i zwiększonego wkładu językowego wraz z graficznym uwydatnieniem (w formie podkreślenia). Przez okres trzech tygodni polscy uczniowie języka angielskiego jako języka obcego czytali krótkie opowiadania zawierające kolokacje o niskiej frekwencji. Następnie ich kompetencja leksykalna została oceniona za pomocą odroczonych testów sprawdzających produktywne i receptywne poziomy wiedzy. Zwiększony wkład językowy wraz z graficznym uwydatnieniem doprowadził do przyrostu wiedzy, ale tylko na poziomach przywołania i rozpoznania form kolokacji. Wyniki przedstawione są w odniesieniu do złożoności procesu przyswajania i mierzenia kolokacji w drugim języku. Artykuł kończy się omówieniem zastosowania wyników badań w nauczaniu języka angielskiego w warunkach formalnych.
Article
To date, there has been little empirical research exploring the relationship between implicit and explicit lexical knowledge (of collocations). As a first step in addressing this gap, two laboratory experiments were conducted that evaluate different conditions (enriched, enhanced, and decontextualized) under which both adult native speakers (Experiment 1) and advanced nonnative speakers of English (Experiment 2) acquire collocations. Three different tests of collocational knowledge were used to assess gains after treatment: two traditional explicit tests (form recall and form recognition) and an innovative implicit test (priming). Results from mixed‐effects modeling showed that all conditions led to significant long‐term gains in explicit form recall and recognition both for natives and nonnatives, while no condition facilitated implicit collocational priming effects either for natives or nonnatives.
Article
This article investigates whether (a) lexical elaboration (LE), typographical enhancement (TE), or a combination, and (b) explicit or implicit LE affect 297 Korean learners' acquisition of English vocabulary. The learners were asked to read one of six versions of an experimental text that contained 26 target words. The study adopted a 2 × 3 MANOVA design with TE and LE as two independent variables and form- and meaning-recognition vocabulary posttests as two dependent variables. The TE had two levels, enhanced and unenhanced, and the LE had three levels, explicit, implicit, and unelaborated. The results were (a) LE alone did not aid form recognition of vocabulary, (b) explicit LE alone aided meaning recognition of vocabulary, (c) TE alone did not aid form and meaning recognition of vocabulary, (d) LE and TE combined did not aid form recognition of vocabulary, (e) both explicit and implicit LE aided meaning recognition of vocabulary, (f) explicit and implicit LE did not differ in their effect on form and meaning recognition of vocabulary, and (g) whether a text was further enhanced in addition to either explicit or implicit LE did not seem to affect the acquisition of the previously unknown words' forms or meanings.
Code
Statistical analysis is a useful skill for linguists and psycholinguists, allowing them to understand the quantitative structure of their data. This textbook provides a straightforward introduction to the statistical analysis of language. Designed for linguists with a non-mathematical background, it clearly introduces the basic principles and methods of statistical analysis, using ’R’, the leading computational statistics programme. The reader is guided step-by-step through a range of real data sets, allowing them to analyse acoustic data, construct grammatical trees for a variety of languages, quantify register variation in corpus linguistics, and measure experimental data using state-of-the-art models. The visualization of data plays a key role, both in the initial stages of data exploration and later on when the reader is encouraged to criticize various models. Containing over 40 exercises with model answers, this book will be welcomed by all linguists wishing to learn more about working with and presenting quantitative data.
Article
Dutch advanced students of French read a French short story in one of three text reading conditions: Marginal Glosses (provision of L1 translations of unknown words), Dictionary (opportunity to use a bilingual dictionary), or Control. After reading, students were tested for their recall of 16 words that had appeared either once or three times in the text. Support was found for the hypothesis that frequency of occurrence will foster incidental vocabulary learning more when advanced second language (L2) readers are given the meanings of unknown words through marginal glosses or when they look up meanings in a dictionary than when no external information concerning unknown words' meanings is available. In the former case, reappearance of a word will reinforce the form-meaning connection in the reader's mental lexicon. In the latter case, readers will often ignore unknown words or incorrectly infer their meanings, which will limit the frequency effect. This article ends with recommendations for teachers and researchers.
Article
German advanced EFL students' productive knowledge of English collocations consisting of a verb and a noun were investigated in a translation task and a cloze task. In the translation task, it was found that, although collocates made up less than a quarter of the total number of lexical words, more than half of the unacceptably translated lexical words were collocates. Thus, for advanced students collocations present a major problem in the production of correct English. Furthermore, since subjects did not express the collocational phrases significantly better in the translation task, where it was possible to paraphrase, than in the cloze task, we concluded that one cannot easily paraphrase one's way around collocations in order to avoid the problem which they present. Finally, it was found that some collocations in the translation task were successfully paraphrased by many students while others were rarely successfully paraphrased. It was concluded that EFL teaching should concentrate on those collocations which cannot readily be paraphrased.
Article
An important idea in second language acquisition is Schmitt's noticing hypothesis, which asserts the importance of consciousness in second language learning, and which has recently been applied to the hitherto neglected area of vocabulary acquisition. One problem area of the lexicon for second language learners of English is the acquisition of formulaic sequences, which are holistically deployed lexical strings that contribute to fluent target language per- formance. It was hypothesized that the problem second language users have with formulaic sequences is that they are not noticed and as a result they are not learned. This paper describes how an experiment was carried out to test whether noticing occurs. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that second language readers do not notice unknown formulaic sequences.
Article
Formulaic language is widely recognized to be of central importance to fluent and idiomatic language use. However, the mechanics of how formulaic language is acquired are not well understood. Some researchers (e.g. Nick Ellis) believe that the chunking inherent in formulaic language drives the language learning process. Others (e.g. Wray) claim that adult second language learners take an essentially non-formulaic approach to language learning, analysing their input into individual words and not retaining information about what words appear together. If the second model is right, it represents a crucial difference between child first and adult second language learning. This ‘non-formulaic’ model is tested here through a lab-based study of collocation learning. Our findings indicate that, contrary to the model, adult second language learners do retain information about what words appear together in their input. This suggests that any shortfall in non-natives’ knowledge of collocational associations between words is due to inadequate input, rather than a non-nativelike approach to learning. The study also examines the effects of different forms of repetition on collocation acquisition and draws conclusions regarding pedagogical activities for learning.
Article
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Article
This paper reports a preliminary evaluation of the Y/N technique for producing tests of vocabulary knowledge. The results obtained suggest advantages over the more traditional multiple choice format for testing vocabulary.
Article
Although it is widely acknowledged that collocations are both indispensable and problematic for language learners and that they therefore should play an important part in second language teaching, especially at an advanced level, learners' difficulties with collocations have not been investigated in much detail so far. This paper reports on an exploratory study that analyses the use of verb-noun collocations such as take a break or shake one's head by advanced German-speaking learners of English in free written production. First, an attempt is made to define 'collocations' as precisely as possible, and the methodology that has been developed for analysing learner collocations in free production is described. Then, the types of mistakes that the learners make when producing collocations are identified and the influence of the degree of restriction of a combination and of the learners' L1 on the production of collocations is investigated. While the degree of restriction emerges to have some, but comparatively little, impact on the difficulty of combinations for the learners, the learners' L1 turns out to have a degree of influence that goes far beyond what earlier (small-scale) studies have predicted. Finally, the implications of these results for teaching are discussed, most importantly the role of L1-L2 differences.
Article
This article investigates EFL learner use of high frequency verbs, and in particular use of the verb MAKE, a major representative of this group. The main questions addressed are: do learners tend to over-or underuse these verbs? Are high-frequency verbs error-prone or safe? What part does transfer play in misuse of these verbs? To answer these questions, authentic learner data has been compared with native speaker data using computerized corpora and linguistic software tools to speed up the initial stage of the linguistic analysis. The article focuses on what proves to be the two most distinctive uses of MAKE, viz. the delexical and causative uses. Results show that EFL learners, even at an advanced proficiency level, have great difficulty with a high frequency verb such as MAKE. They also demonstrate that some of these problems are shared by the two groups of learners under consideration (Swedish-and French-speaking learners) while others seem to be L1-related. In the conclusion, the pedagogical implications of the study are discussed and suggestions made for using concordance-based exercises as a way of raising learners' awareness of the complexity of high-frequency verbs.
Article
Psychological studies about implicit/explicit learning in language acquisition have typically been concerned with the acquisition of grammatical structures. Reber (1967) was the first researcher to formulate a theory of implicit learn- ing on the basis of experiments on the learning of miniature artificial gram- mars, in which he demonstrated that information was abstracted out of the environment without conscious operations; since then, the analysis of implicit and explicit learning has developed considerably, and theories have been pro- posed which go beyond the context of learning artificial languages in experi- mental settings (cf. Ellis 1994b). In the field of vocabulary acquisition, the nature of the implicit/explicit distinction is somewhat different than in grammar learning, and research in this area is still very scarce. Furthermore, it seems that the debate about im- plicit/explicit learning and vocabulary acquisition has frequently been blurred by a confusion of the issue under discussion. This can be illustrated by the diverse terminology used, contrasting e.g. 'incidental' vs. 'intentional' learn- ing, 'attended' vs. 'unattended' learning, or 'implicit' acquisition vs. 'explicit' directed learning. Among these terms, particularly the notion of incidental vocabulary acquisition constitutes a central research focus in L2 pedagogy which is insufficiently distinguished from the concept of implicit learning in psychology. In an attempt to disentangle and relate these two terms, the present paper investigates in how far incidental vocabulary acquisition can be said to corre- spond to implicit (and/or explicit) learning. For such a discussion, the ap- proach suggested by Ellis (1994c) appears to offer a valuable framework and starting point; yet, a preliminary clarification of terminological issues seems to be required due to the inconsistent uses and definitions of the basic terms in the literature. The paper thus starts out with a theoretical discussion of the
Article
This paper re-analyses the notion of consciousness raising in language learning. The process by which language input becomes salient to the learner is termed 'input enhancement'. This process can come about as a result of deliberate manipulation, or it can be the natural outcome of some internal learning strategy. It can vary quantitatively and qualitatively, not necessarily involv ing conscious analysis of rules. Externally induced salience may not neces sarily be registered by the learner and even when it is registered, it may not affect the learning mechanisms per se. Certain inferences are made about the interpretation of learner performance and ways of measuring it.
Article
The present study investigates the use of English verb-noun collocations in the writing of native speakers of Hebrew at three proficiency levels. For this purpose, we compiled a learner corpus that consists of about 300,000 words of argumentative and descriptive essays. For comparison purposes, we selected LOCNESS, a corpus of young adult native speakers of English. We retrieved the 220 most frequently occurring nouns in the LOCNESS corpus and in the learner corpus, created concordances for them, and extracted verb-noun collocations. Subsequently, we performed two types of comparisons: learners were compared with native speakers on the frequency of collocation use and learners were compared with other learners of different second-language proficiencies on the frequency and correctness of collocations. The data revealed that learners at all three proficiency levels produced far fewer collocations than native speakers, that the number of collocations increased only at the advanced level, and that errors, particularly interlingual ones, continued to persist even at advanced levels of proficiency. We discuss the results in light of the nature of collocations and communicative learning and suggest some pedagogical implications.
Article
This study focused on the relationship between percentage of vocabulary known in a text and level of comprehension of the same text. Earlier studies have estimated the percentage of vocabulary necessary for second language learners to understand written texts as being between 95% (Laufer, 1989) and 98% (Hu & Nation, 2000). In this study, 661 participants from 8 countries completed a vocabulary measure based on words drawn from 2 texts, read the texts, and then completed a reading comprehension test for each text. The results revealed a relatively linear relationship between the percentage of vocabulary known and the degree of reading comprehension. There was no indication of a vocabulary “threshold,” where comprehension increased dramatically at a particular percentage of vocabulary knowledge. Results suggest that the 98% estimate is a more reasonable coverage target for readers of academic texts.