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type of association between words. Productive vocabulary can be activated by other words because it has many incoming and outgoing links with other words.
e. Number of Words
The English language is said to contain around 54,000 word families when these are counted in a large dictionary Nation and Waring in Cameron, 2001.
Whereas Webster’s Third New Dictionary, the largest non-historical dictionary of English, contains around 114,000 words families excluding proper names.
First and secon d language learners’ vocabulary stretch in vocabulary size
differently. An educated native speaker is estimated to have around 20,000 word families Cameron, 2001. It is resulted by adding a thousand to 5,000 words a
year by age of five. In the other hand, most adult of second language learners will only acquire around 5,000 word families even after several years of study. The
most important thing to remember is that the first language learners can easily learn to the language in their daily life. They have all access to the language use.
Television, magazines and communication with other native speakers are the best way to improve their vocabulary. In contrast, second language learners cannot do
the same thing. They should attend to the school to learn English. No real atmosphere of the real English is provided. They rarely use the authentic material
of English. It makes hard for the second language learners to have the same amount of vocabulary compared to the first language learners. By the great
amount of words of English, a second language learner seems to have lower word acquisition than native learner.
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However, there is a minimum level of vocabulary that should be mastered as stated by Cameron 2001. He states that the core vocabulary around 2,000 is
sufficient for learner to serve in most situations. It is the number of words in daily conversation of native speakers. In addition, 2,000 more frequent words will
provide the learner a better understanding to the written texts where it is estimated that the learner will know nine out of every ten words in most written texts. Most
researchers recommend a basic vocabulary of at least 3,000 word families, while for more specialized need, over 5,000 word families are desirable. By the various
amounts of the words explained above, it can be assumed that a second language learner can achieve a level where he can communicate and comprehend the
written text well if heshe can acquire up to 5000 word families. It is important to note that not all words are equally useful in using the
language. High frequency words are more beneficial to learn than low frequency words. High frequency words are frequently used in communication and occur in
the written text while low frequency words are frequently used in scientific written text. When words are considered in terms of their frequency of use in
written texts, it seems that the most frequent 20,000 English words account a large portion 80 or more of all text Nation, 2001. So we can say that another
30,000 word families from the total 54,000 word families Nation and Waring in Cameron, 2001 are regarded less important to learn than the 20,000 high
frequency words.
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f. Vocabulary Size
There is a totally ambitious goal for EFL learner to know all words in the language. It is almost impossible for a language learner especially who learn L2 or
foreign language to know all words in the target language. Even a native speaker does not know all words in the language. There are, what Nation called,
‘specialized vocabulary” that only a small group of people in the area who know the words. To have better understanding of this area, Nation differentiates the
word counted that fall into four categories. They are tokens, types, lemmas, and word families.
Tokens are the running words in the sentence, clause, paragraph, or text. Whatever words occur, it is counted as tokens. The way is simply to count the
words occur even if they are the same words. For example, the sentence ‘ I have
to go to the market’ has seven tokens, even though it occurs twice in the sentence. Types are rather different from tokens. If we see the same word again, we do not
count it again. So in the sentence ‘ I have to go to the market’, there are six types as the second it is not counted. Lemmas consist of headword and some of its
inflected and reduced n’t form. Usually all items included under the lemmas are in the same part of speech Francis and Kucera in Nation, 2001. Hence, the plural,
present tense, past tense, past participle, comparative, superlative, -ing, possessive are under the same lemma. The emphasis of the lemmas is that the words are in
the same part of speech. The idea of the lemmas is lying behind the learning burden. The learning burden of an item is the amount of effort required to learn it
Nation, 2001. Word families are the last thing to count about the words of the
