Computer frequency control of vocabulary in language learning reading materials

Vocabulary is one of the major obstacles to attaining reading fluency in a second language. The major European literary languages have vocabularies of many tens of thousands of items. For efficient learning, the vocabulary systems must be structured in terms of frequency groupings so that the more frequent items are mastered before the less frequent ones. The learner, however, has no way of determining the relative frequency of the words in his text. The solution involves: 1) the establishment of various word frequency groups and 2) marking the words in the reading text so that the learner has a clear set of rational priorities. Statistical studies suggest that approximately the most frequent 5,000 words constitute a minimum vocabulary for liberated reading and account for about 90% of the different words in an average text. The learning of the less frequent items should be deferred until these are mastered. Further, the presentation of the higher frequency words within the 1,000–5,000 range should be sequenced by groups in terms of their relative frequencies. Each group might correspond to a particular level of language proficiency. This goal can be attained by means of a system in which the frequency category of each text word is marked so that the learner knows its relative importance and can structure his vocabulary acquisition accordingly. A marking procedure by frequency is integrated with a marginal translation or glossing routine. The article proposes a set of frequency groups and describes an algorithm for the implementation of a frequency identification and marking procedure on an IBM 360 computer. A sample page of a Russian text book utilizing the technique is given and several other potential utilizations are described.