What's a Working Vocabulary

Next up on my coverage of the issues for adult learners of English, is the nature of a “working” vocabulary.  You may sometimes see a term with an equivalent meaning of “functional vocabulary.”

The problem for adult learners involves:  how does an individual get a strong working vocabulary?

As with most situations, it certainly helps, and may even be mandatory, to define the nature of the issue before seeking a resolution.

So . . . what language skills experts appear to have settled on is that a “working vocabulary” involves that percentage of vocabulary words an individual knows that she or he is likely to use his/herself in speaking and writing.

Since I spend much of my communication time with people who are either readers, writers in some form, or both that definition brought me up short.

Taking myself [and pretty much every other writer I know] as examples:  there are a substantial quantity of words in MY vocabulary that I COULD in the appropriate situation call upon for use in communicating to someone in spoken or written form, and yet I probably would not.

So, I would say that a working vocabulary includes those words an individual knows with enough familiarity not to need to look them up in a dictionary when encountering that word during the reading of a fiction or reference piece of reading.  Even then, I’d give the exception of needing to look up the word if it occurs in a radically different way than the reader has encountered before for that word, given that many English words have ten or more different meanings.

So, for non-native speaker/writers, there are potentially two issues here, at least:  1) realistic assessment of the current state of the individual’s working vocabulary, and 2) how does an individual acquire a strong one?

The estimates I saw suggested that the actual vocabulary, on which working vocabulary is based, of literate native English speakers at about high school graduation encompasses approximately forty to forty five thousand words.  But, as to a working vocabulary, the figures seem to vary to somewhere between six thousand to ten thousand words.

Broken down, the studies that indicated these statistics noted that for a child to acquire a vocabulary containing forty five thousand words by high school graduation, the word acquisition rate is three thousand to three thousand five hundred words per year.   My own mathematical cross check indicates that, assuming high school graduation at the typical age within the United States of seventeen, the actual average annual acquisition rate for a child brought up speaking and writing the language is approximately two thousand six hundred forty seven unknown words annually.  Of course, the rate of acquisition is going to vary with the age of the child.

For those who really want to get down to the nitty-gritty, that translates to an acquisition of an average of seven and a quarter new words daily, on average, for seventeen years.

Of course, a working vocabulary includes the most common words in the language that we use daily:  such as “is/are,” various prepositions, and even the word “word.”

What a native speaker needs to do is find the most efficient replication, within his or her own personal circumstances, of the level of exposure that native speakers experienced from infancy up through high school graduation.

There are some aspects of this that cannot be replicated.  Even if an adult English language learner could capitalize on a version of learning through the phonetic characteristics of nursery rhymes and lullabies, the experience would still lack the parent-child bonding that a native speaker/writer experiences along with the early language exposure:  and which can have an impact, in that it conveys attitude, on the infant’s language skills development. 

Nor can an adult learner with existing language skills in another language reproduce the “clean slate” experience of infancy.  The infant has little or nothing filed in memory banks as yet.  This provides an absorbancy quotient for new data, including language skills, that an adult learner cannot duplicate.

What is the goal, in effect?

This is the crux of the problem facing adult language learners:  how do they most efficiently, being adults with responsibilities, provide the exposure that allows them to encounter that almost three thousand words per year?  Or, in some instances when “make up” time is taken into account, well over three thousand new English vocabulary words per year. 

A sense of realism about it, also, should allow those learning English as a second language to cut themselves some slack in the process.

It’s a monumental task they have undertaken, and any show of progress deserves recognition.

In order for an adult learner to define the most effective means of replicating vocabulary acquisition, which starts with exposure, within the individual’s own circumstances, the adult learner needs to have an awareness of the factors involved in adult learning in general, specific factors that pose challenges in learning English, and the nature of challenges in generating that exposure that may arise simply from the fact of living the life style of the average adult.

Additional posts on this area will explore each of these aspects of English vocabulary acquisition for adult learners.