Transcriber: Razmik Badalyan Reviewer: Hiroko Kawano
Thanks, Patrick.
Well, yes, it's true.
My name is Charlie Brown.
(Laughter) (Applause)
Well, right now, I am working here in Tokyo, Japan at Meiji Gakuin University
as a professor of applied linguistics.
And I've actually been in Japan, working in education,
for about close to 30 years now.
My area of focus
is second language vocabulary acquisition
and also eLearning.
Tonight I just want to have a few words with all of you about a few words of mine.
Basically, what I've done is I've created a word list, actually several word lists,
that I think are very foundational, important core words
for second language learners.
But before I get to talking about that list of words,
I think it's probably better to just begin at the beginning
and talk a little bit about the size and scope
of the English language.
I'm not sure if you ever thought about this or you ever looked it up,
but in the largest dictionary of English, which is the Oxford English Dictionary,
there is more than 600,000 word families in the dictionary.
And word families means all of the different kinds of a word.
So, accept, accepting, acceptable, accepts - that's all one word.
So there's actually millions of words in the English language.
It's an enormous, almost incomprehensible number.
But fortunately for us, not all words are created equally.
Fortunately for us, native speakers on average use far less than 600,000.
If, for example,
you were to measure the vocabulary size of a native speaker of English
who grew up in an English-speaking country -
somebody who's gone on all the way through to college -
by the time they've graduated college
they've mastered somewhere between 25 and 30 thousand words
of English.
So, in other words, only about five percent
of the English language.
Now, that's really good -
30,000 is a lot less than 600,000 -
but what about second-language learners of English?
I'm working here in Japan,
and I'm always worried about the needs of my students.
And the news is not quite as good here.
If we look at, for example, Japanese students,
after they've studied English for a total of 14 years -
two years in elementary school, three years in junior high,
three in senior high and four in college -
after 14 years of study, they only know about 2,000 words of English.
That's far less than the 30,000 that native speakers know.
And this is not a problem that is just only happening in Japan.
Almost all second-language learners of English all around the world
suffer from the same kind of numbers.
After hundreds of hours of study and years of study,
they are still not even close to the level of native speakers.
And this is really one of the things that sort of worried me and puzzled me
and I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out.
What I wanted to try and figure out
is if I could find some kind of a shortcut
or shortcuts for second language learners.
So if native speakers are here at about 30,000
and non-natives are down at about one or two thousand,
are there certain words that are more important than others,
certain words that are more useful,
that if the students knew a certain list of words less than 30,000,
could they get through most English books and magazines and things like that?
And the answer is yes.
But how do we figure out those words?
Well, that's the science of corpus linguistics,
and that's what I do.
Basically, what a corpus is
is a large collection of texts.
And what you see on the left-hand side of your screen
is a whole bunch of texts being thrown into a computer.
And the computer basically helps us to analyze those texts
and to try and figure out which of the words are more frequent,
which of the words are more important.
And with a little bit of luck, a little bit of sweat, a little bit of hard work,
we're able to identify a really nice tight group of words
that really can help students out.
And this is exactly what I and my colleagues have done
in creating what's called "The New General Service List,"
or the NGSL.
We used a corpus of about 273 million words
that's made up of both spoken English and written English,
that has American English and British English
and pulled it all together,
and when we analyzed that corpus,
we were able to come up with a list of just 2,800 words.
And those 2,800 words give actually a very incredible 90 to 92% coverage
for most books, magazines, newspapers, anything that students might read,
and actually an even higher coverage
if they try to watch TV or watch a Hollywood movie.
So these are really, really useful words.
And 2,800 sounds like a lot,
but that's less than 10% of what a native speaker knows
and less than one percent of the entire English language.
So once we publish this list -
you know, as a professor at an Ivory Tower school,
the thing that we're supposed to do is publish papers -
so one of the first things we did was started to write research papers.
So if you go to a library at a university somewhere,
you'll see some of my papers gathering dust in an ivory tower.
But this is absolutely not why we did this project.
We did the research to show that what we did was on the up and up.
But really, our main purpose was to identify a list of words
that we thought would be useful for language learners
and then to just work as hard as we could to get tools
out in the hands of students, teachers, text writers and researchers
to actually be able to use those words.
So this website that I've created called "newgeneralservicelist.org."
sort of collects all of those resources.
And if you go to the website, what you'll see
is just this incredible collection that's growing every day
of free resources to help you to take advantage of the list.
Of course, there's downloadable versions of the various word lists we've made.
There's definitions in easy English and Japanese
so that learners can sort of learn the words
without having to deal with very long definitions.
There's a whole host of online learning applications,
online assessment tools, online research tools,
text analysis and grading tools.
And there's a blog which sort of updates you
on all of the new happenings with the NGSL.
And what I'd like to do just for the last two or three minutes of my presentation
is just show you a few screenshots of some of these resources.
So for example,
there are a few really nice free websites
for flashcard learning of new words.
And two of my favorite are quizlet.com and memrise.com.
They're really nice, number one because they're free
and as poor teachers, we love free.
But the nice thing about Memrise and Quizlet
is you can upload any word list you want
and then you can start learning them via not only flashcards
but all kinds of different, really interactive learning activities
and games.
And you'll find the NGSL on both of those websites.
But most of my students, rather than using PCs to learn,
they actually prefer using their smartphones.
So one of the first things I did
was I started to create a series of free iPhone and Android applications
to help students to learn those word lists.
And so you can go into one of the stores
and you can probably find a NGSL builder in either store now.
But also, we needed to create tools
to help researchers and people who are writing or analyzing text.
And one of my favorite text analysis tools is called "VocabProfile."
Now why is this tool important?
Well, let's imagine that your students know the 2,800 words of the NGSL
and you want to introduce to them a native speaker level text.
How do you know if the text is at the right level for those students or not?
Well, VocabProfile is one of the tools that can help you to do that.
So what I've got here, the way the tool works,
you just copy and paste the text you want to analyze
into the white box that you in the center there,
you click on the NGSL button and then hit submit.
And what you get
is a really nice color-coded readout of the difficulty of the text.
And what I've done here is I've copied and pasted
into the textbox the first chapter of Harry Potter.
And what we can see on the next screen here
is that Harry Potter, if you know the NGSL words,
you'll have about 93% coverage.
You'll know 93% of the words in Harry Potter
if you know just the 2,800 words in the NGSL.
So VocabProfile is one really nice tool.
I've helped to create another tool, called OGTE -
that's the one on the right -
and also another one, called Antwordprofiler,
also uses the NGSL - that's the one on the left.
So there's definitely a growing range of analytical tools
that you can use with the NGSL.
Now, what about students?
So we have these 2,800 words.
Let's say a teacher wants their students to learn those words.
Well, where do they begin?
They already know some English,
so they're going to know some of those words.
They don't want to study them all. Where's the best place to start?
Well, if we want to know their starting point,
we need a test.
So, two researchers down in Miyazaki developed a really nice test called NGSLT.
And this short test allows you to very quickly figure out
where your strengths and weaknesses are in terms of knowledge of the NGSL.
And the nice thing is as soon as it's identified your weakness in the NGSL,
it sort of sends you over to Quizlet
so that you can start learning those exact words via flashcards.
In addition to the NGSL -
that's the box in yellow at the bottom, NGSL is general English -
once you've mastered the NGSL, there are other shortcuts as well.
If you're a student going on to a four-year school,
a four-year university in an English-speaking country,
there are certain academic words
that occur very, very frequently in academic lectures and academic text.
And we've made a list -
that's the top left green one, called the NAWL -
that's a list of academic words that can help you to succeed in academic settings.
The one in the center is our TOEIC list -
that gives 99% coverage for if you are trying to pass the TOEIC exam.
And then we're also working on a business English list as well.
So if you want more information about the NGSL,
you can go to our website.
You can find out about it on Wikipedia.
We also have a Facebook page.
And all of these are our places to go
if you want to sort of look at the kind of resources that we've developed.
I hope that through this presentation
you've come to understand that all words are not created equally,
that there are certain words
that are very important and can really help our students.
And I and my colleagues who made this list,
we're just very happy that we could make a small contribution
to helping our students to maybe get proficient in English
a little bit more quickly.
So, thank you very much for your time.
(Applause) (Cheers)
Patrick: Thanks, man.