A group of researchers have counted the vocabulary that occur in a number of TOEIC preparation books. They found 1.5 million words and used software to find 1200 words that are most likely to help you understand the questions on the TOEIC test. Does that mean that if you study those 1200 words you will be able to understand the vocabulary in order to answer the questions and pass the test? You also need to know the grammar, too, of course, but you can't answer a question if you don't know the vocabulary in the questions about a reading text and in the possible answers.
Well, yes and no. In addition to the powerful 1200 words that are most useful to study for the TOEIC test, there are also core English words that you need to know. The researchers also looked at a collection of 273,613,534 words(!) from a variety of kinds of English in order to find the words that are most helpful to understand the most kinds of English texts. They came up with 2800 common words in the NGSL (in the title of this post) to understand 92.34% of common English texts.
Well, yes and no. In addition to the powerful 1200 words that are most useful to study for the TOEIC test, there are also core English words that you need to know. The researchers also looked at a collection of 273,613,534 words(!) from a variety of kinds of English in order to find the words that are most helpful to understand the most kinds of English texts. They came up with 2800 common words in the NGSL (in the title of this post) to understand 92.34% of common English texts.
Finally, they looked at the TOEIC list of 1.5 million words and checked to find out how well a test taker could understand words in a TOEIC test using their TOEIC and NGSL word lists. The researchers found that the 2800 words would cover 94% of the TOEIC words and with the 5% coverage of their TOEIC word lists they found a test taker could understand 99% of the TOEIC materials. You might ask why the NGSL covers only 92.34% of "regular" English but 94% of the TOEIC list. The reason is the the words selected for the TOEIC materials are not random.
Of course studying and mastering these the 1200 words in the TOEIC list and the 2800 words on the NGSL does not guarantee that a test taker would understand 99% of any TOEIC test. There is a little bit of chance involved because each test is different and uses different texts. However, each of the publishers of the TOEIC study materials did their best to collect texts and questions from previous TOEIC tests, and the TOEIC test writers did their best to find texts that were based on English as it is used in many types of texts, so together that 99% comprehension is probably pretty close.
Some vocabulary researchers have said that readers need about 98% coverage in order to understand a text. That means that out of 100 words, a reader can guess the meaning of 98 of the words even if 2 words are missing. Some researchers suggest that knowing even 95% of the words might be enough. Another point is the TOEIC test taker will have some context based on the question and that might help fill in the gaps.
These lists of words are available free online. I will explain more about them in my next post, but if you are eager to get started, one place you can find them is on Memrise. Memrise offers a pay service, but you can access many lists of vocabulary for free. Memrise also offers apps for iOS and Android and also online. You can sign up using your Geidai Google account or other services.
In a future blog I will explain a little bit most about how to use Memrise.
TOEIC List in English
TOEIC List in Japanese
NGSL List in English
The NGSL List in Japanese
TOEIC Service List by Browne, C. and Culligan, B. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.charlie-browne.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.charlie-browne.com.
