These native speakers of English obtain 4,000 to 5,000 words when they are five years old and then they roughly learn 1,000 words each year. Goulden, Nation and Reed (1990) believe that native graduate students of university know about 20,000 words. An estimation is that native speakers of English know between 12,000 to 20,000 words depending on their educational level. Despite such difficulties, researchers have attempted to find out how many words native speakers know, so that they can realize the number of words needed for EFL or ESL learners. So, differ, differs, differed, and differing would all be members of the same lemma because they all have the same stem – all are verbs. A lemma is a set of related words that consists of the stem form and inflected forms that are all the same part of speech. The most conservative way, according to Nation (2000), is to count lemmas. McCarten (2007) refers to a number of needed words as well as an appropriate list of words besides other challenges in the field.Īccording to Zimmerman (2009), it is not easy to find out how many words are there in English because, as he exemplifies, items such as differ, difference, different, and differently are considered one word or four? A major problem with counting word families is deciding what should be counted as a member of a word family. In addition to vocabulary depth and breadth, there are other challenges that teachers, learners, and educationalists deal with. On the other hand, the number of words that learners must learn is also an important issue which is called "vocabulary breadth". Therefore teachers and learners are expected to learn these aspects of each new word which is technically referred to as "vocabulary depth". Associations : to know how does a word relate to other words.
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