Vocabulary: How Many Words Are Enough? Principles of Minimizing Learners’ Vocabulary

This article analyses methodology of compiling Russian general wordlists and lexical minima for teaching Russian for specific purposes. The study systematizes three approaches: linguo-didactic, linguo-statistical, and corpus-based. The article also describes the process and results of applying all the three methods to the development of a lexical minimum based on political science corpus. Methodological analysis comprises general word lists for the Russian State Standard Exam (TRKI), the System of lexical minima by V. V. Morkovkin, and the Frequency dictionary of the Russian language for foreigners, created by S. A. Sharov as a part of the KELLY project, as well as special lexical minima for medicine, robotics, nuclear energy, and mathematics. It has been revealed that the core element in the development of a discipline-specific lexical minimum is minimization that involves a set of principles determining the optimal length of the list and lexeme selection. For the Russian general word lists, the most common principles of minimization are methodical expediency (“relevance” of the word at each level), quantitative metrics, including absolute and relative frequencies, the word rank, and a coverage index, showing the percentage of text that every lexeme covers. The article reports the results of combining the quantitative methods, corpus-based analysis, and didactic principles to apply to the development of the lexical minimum based on political science textbooks. The core index, defining the length of this list, was coverage which revealed that 8,237 most frequent lexemes cover 98 % of the whole corpus. The linguo-didactic analysis showed that 1, 000 most frequent lexemes, without stop-words, cover 50 % of this corpus, and therefore this wordlist allows foreign learners to understand about a half of the corpus. After reaching the point of 3,500 of the most frequent words, the coverage index grows insignificantly, and this number can be considered to be a target in teaching and learning discipline-specific vocabulary. It is notable that the recommended lexical minimum, comprising 1,000-3,500 of the most frequent words, is only a starting point for reading comprehension of texts for professionals also referred to as ‘special’ texts. Their deeper and effective understanding also involves competence in rhetoric strategies and text structure.

Russian language for specific purposes, lexical minima, word list, corpus linguistics, Russian language, criteria of lexical selection, word dispersion, word frequency, coverage, number of words