How Large a Vocabulary Is Needed for Reading and Listening?

This article has two goals: to report on the trialling of fourteen 1,000 word-family lists made from the British National Corpus, and to use these lists to see what vocabulary size is needed for unassisted comprehension of written and spoken English. The trialling showed that the lists were properly sequenced and there were no glaring omissions from the lists. If 98% coverage of a text is needed for unassisted comprehension, then a 8,000 to 9,000 word-family vocabulary is needed for comprehension of written text and a vocabulary of 6,000 to 7,000 for spoken text. L'article a pour objectif de parler des essais menés sur quatorze listes de 1 000 familles de mots tirées du British National Corpus et de l'emploi de ces listes pour évaluer la taille du vocabulaire nécessaire afin de comprendre sans aide l'anglais oral et écrit. Les essais ont révélé que les listes sont adéquatement triées et ne contiennent aucune omission manifeste. Si on doit connaître 98 % des mots d'un texte pour le comprendre sans aide, il faut un vocabulaire de 8 000 à 9 000 familles de mots pour comprendre un texte écrit et un vocabulaire de 6 000 à 7 000 mots pour un texte oral.

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