Vocabulary size and the skills of listening, reading and writing

TLDR

The study investigates how vocabulary size relates to EFL learners’ listening, reading, and writing skills. The study involved 88 Danish lower‑secondary EFL learners whose listening, reading, and writing were measured in the national school‑leaving exam. Vocabulary size was strongly linked to reading and writing, moderately to listening, and explained a substantial portion of listening variance; learners lacking the 2000 most frequent words performed poorly, indicating that reaching a 2000‑word level is a key goal for low‑level EFL learners.

Abstract

This paper presents an empirical study investigating the relationship between vocabulary size and the skills of listening, reading and writing in English as a foreign language (EFL). The participants were 88 EFL learners from lower secondary education whose language skills were assessed as part of the national school leaving examination in Denmark. Learners' receptive vocabulary size was found to be strongly associated with their reading and writing abilities and moderately associated with their listening ability. However, vocabulary size could still explain a significant and substantial portion of the variance in the listening scores. These results thus emphasise the importance of vocabulary size for language proficiency. Furthermore, it was found that the majority of the learners did not know the most frequent 2000 words in English, but if they did, they would also perform adequately in the listening, reading and writing tests. These findings therefore suggest that the 2000 vocabulary level is a crucial learning goal for low-level EFL learners.