Achieving Native-like English Lexical Knowledge: The Non-native Story

Abstract

When one knows a word at this level, one can use and recognize it in idioms, jokes, slang, and puns (Johnson, Johnson, & Schlicting, 2004). Besides discussing the students. levels of receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge, this paper expands its discussion on other issues related to the above findings. According to Nation (1990), the 2,000- and 3,000-word levels contain the high-frequency words that all learners need to know in order to function effectively in English. [...]words at the University level should help students in reading their textbooks and other academic reading material. The target of 17,000 word families for university-educated non-native English speakers is achievable according to several studies. Since Cervatiuc.s (2007) study, for instance, indicates that the average receptive vocabulary size of highly proficient university-educated non-native English speakers range between 13,500 and 20,000 base words, the finding is comparable to university-educated native English speakers. vocabulary size which is around 17,000 word families.