How many words is 1700 words?
ON APR 8, 2021 BY DETERMINED LINGUISTIN MFL IN THE UK TODAY
It is proposed that in GCSE, students will be expected to learn 1700 words at Higher Tier. How does that compare? Well, it is less than the 2100 words that Realschule (equivalent of Foundation Tier) students learning French in Germany (for more comparisons, see this post)
https://transformmfl.wordpress.com/2021 ... 700-words/What this shows is:
Higher tier students will be given a vocab list at least 44% smaller than the vocab list for O-level – and that’s a conservative estimate.
This disparity is actually very similar to the difference in attainment observed by Milton: in his study, GCSE learners knew 40% fewer words than their O-level counterparts did 20-40 years post-hoc. This new proposal engineers in a continuous decline in standards.
The O-level list was already weighted towards high frequency words – by a considerable margin. The idea of prioritising frequency is not new.
BUT the O-level list has roughly 50% high frequency words and 50% low frequency words – precisely the proportions recommended by researchers such as Milton (“An effective textbook is probably going to introduce frequent andinfrequent vocabulary in roughly equal amounts” 2009)
The total number of high frequency (top 2000) words on the list from O-level and the proposed GCSE are very similar: 1200 ish each)
But what O-level had was 1000 (at least) additional, extra words, in the lower (beyond the top 2000) frequency bands, which related to thematic and topic words (the ones which allow us to talk about things)
Remember that this Thimann book is an under-estimate of what was taught (he excludes cognates, grammar words and very common words), whereas the proposed GCSE list is exhaustive for both productive and receptive purposes.
If you want to see an example exam paper from precisely the year when students might have been using this vocab book, click here.
https://www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/ ... npaper.pdf1967J-French-OLevel-QuestionPaper