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Literature Review Literature

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Literature Review:
Researchers have identified vocabulary that occurs very frequently and recommended that English-language teachers give it priority in their classroom practices. Coady (1997) believed a group of 2,000 to 3,000 high-frequency words should be studied until they become sight words. This is also the range of the colloquial language for listening and speaking (Nation, 2005). Specifically there is a Dolch word list which contains 220 sight words (Jesness, 2004). The General Service List of English Words (GSL) contains 2,000 high-frequency words and covers 87% of a general text. It also provides information about the relative frequency of the meanings of each entry (Schmitt, 2000). Out of these words are 270 function words which carry grammatical meaning and account for about 44% of words in a general text (Macaro, 2003). Other basic words that ELLs need to know later on can be found in the Academic Word List by Cox-head (2000) and the University Word List by Xue and Nation (1984). The former consists of 570 words and accounts for about 10% of words in academic texts; and the latter, 800 words, about 8%.

You might think that vocabulary is simply words. It does, however, delve a little deeper than that. In order to develop your word knowledge, you need to be aware of some of the different types of vocabulary (see Figure 1): (Taken from Pikulski and Templeton (2004, p.2).)
Expressive vocabulary consists of words that we use when we speak or write. Receptive

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