Chapter 1: Introduction

Vietnamese students usually feel bored in vocabulary lessons because

they have not changed their learning habits, such as writing words on

paper, trying to learn by heart or learning passively through the teacher's

explanations. To help students find language classes, especially

vocabulary lessons more interesting, and to achieve more from games, we

conducted action research to find the answer to the question," Do games

help students learn vocabulary effectively, and if so, how?" Most

academic reviews start from an assumption that games, bundled with

other aspects of learning, eg, CALL, are beneficial. However we singled

out the component of games to study that in isolation. After reviewing

academic opinions on this specifically focussed matter, of which there are

relatively few, we began action research which included applying games

in our own classes, observing other teachers' classes, and interviewing

both teachers and learners so as to elicit students' reactions, feelings and

the effectiveness of games in vocabulary learning. The research

Vocabulary knowledge is essential for fluent second language (L2) use.

Learners need a large amount of vocabulary to communicate success-

fully in a L2, with studies showing that, to reach successful comprehen-

sion of a wide range of written and spoken discourse, learners need to

know around 6,000 to 7,000 and 8,000 to 9,000 word families,

respectively (Nation, 2006).

Chapter 2: Literature Review

How much vocabulary do learners need to study?

the number of word, the number of words knowns by native speakers, ,

the number of word needed to use the language

Aspects of Vocabulary

Word concepts can be defined in different ways, but the three impotant

aspects that we need to know and focus on are form, meaning, and use.

Form: pronunciation, spelling , sparts,…

Meaning: form- meaning relationship, concept and references,

associations

Use : gramatical functions, collocations , constraints on use

According to Nation (2001), the form of a word involves its

pronunciation (spoken form), spelling (written form), and any word parts

that make up this particular item (such as a prefix, root, and suffix).

According to Nation (2001) stated that meaning encompasses the way

that form

and meaning work together, in other words, the concept and what

items it refers to, and the associations that come to mind when people

think about a specific word or expression.

Use, Nation (2001) noted, involves the grammatical functions of the word

or phrase, collocations that normally go with it, and finally any

constraints on its use, in terms

of frequency, level, and so forth.

High frequency

Certain words appear more often than others. Words with a low

frequency of occurrence - uncommon words - are not worth studying

unless they are relevant to your specific field of study. (nnn, 2008).

Words with a high frequency of occurrence, on the other hand, should be

learned because you will most likely meet them frequently while reading

or listening. It might be difficult to determine how common a word is. (A,

2006)

High-frequency words are one of the most common forms of sight words

(words that children are taught to identify "on sight") and are those that

appear most frequently in written material, such as "and," "the," "as," and

"it." They are frequently words that have little significance on their own

but greatly add to the meaning of a statement as a whole.

A few of the high-frequency words may be pronounced by using basic

phonic principles, such as "it," which is a simple word to read using

phonics. Many of the high-frequency words, however, are not phonically

regular and hence difficult to read in the early stages.

Some high-frequency words are referred to as tricky words or sight

words. Aside from being difficult to pronounce, most of these high-

frequency words also have fairly abstract meaning that is difficult to

explain to children. Words like "cat" and "home" are simple to learn

because they can be easily associated with a real thing or an image, but

conveying the words "the" or "of" is difficult since there is no point of

reference.

Reference:

https://www.eapfoundation.com/vocab/features/

https://www.twinkl.com.vn/teaching-wiki/high-frequency-words

How many middle and low frequency words should we learn?

Middle–frequency words are words that are beyond 3000 level and less than
10000 level, from 3001 to 9000 more correctly (Schmitt and Schmitt, 2014). To
achieve 98% of words, one of the most effective ways is listening and watching
movies. For example, horror, drama and crime move often take around 5000
word-families to coverage.
War movies and animations usually take 9000 – 10000-word families to fully
understand (Schmitts, 2014, p.495). Mid-frequency words are needed in certain
topics and situations, some of them also cooperate with the universities’
English studies. In a high-intermediate class, only 2% of speech spoken by
students was beyond the high-frequency bands. The middle frequency is also
used for defining other words (technical words). (Schmitts, 2014, p. 495).
According to Schmitt and Schmitt (2014), a vocabulary that is considered low-
frequency words is when that word has very limited use (over 9000-word
families).
Learners that reach to the 8000–9000-word families can be able to read and
understand a wide range of authentic novels and newspaper without any
assistance. “For example, if reader’s vocabulary covers 95-98 % of a text, he
is likely to comprehend 60-68 % of that text.” (Schmitts, 2014, pp. 489-490)
How many words should we learn to understand 98% of all
situations?

Practice has proven that, how many methods to understand 98% of all

situations in English, It is divided into many methods and aspects that

will be listed below.

The first method is to study how many words there are in English and

classify them for each situation like: reading, writing, listening, and

conversation and set a goal of how many words are needed to understand

98% of communication situations in life.

The second way is observing what the native speaker know in many

aspects of the words and see that as the goal because the native speaker

who is well-educated know about 200000 words when they are 20 years

old and the nonnative speaker who are learning advanced english degree

that their English vocabulary is around 8000 to 9000 words. Try to learn

by following the native speaker perspective.

The third way understands the structures in English, When you can

distinguish Subject - Verb - Complement in any sentence, you will easily

combine new sentence structures, especially, it will help you a lot in

creating English sentences in different sentences. Actual conversation.

How much comprehension needed to understand a text or

conversation?

Text coverage is the amount if words learners understand while

participating in reading or listening

If the text coverage is 80% (which means that 1 out of 5 words are

nonsense) then the learners would learn nothing. If the percentage goes

up to 90% (1 out of 10 words are nonsense) then the learners learn a

small amount of information from the material. At 95% (1 nonsense word

out of 20), learners gain a bit more information but still not adequate.

Lastly, at 98% (1 unknown word out of 50) is where the learners gain

adequate understanding of the materials.

An analysis conducted by British National Corpus using a 1000-word

family lists (Nation, 2006) indicates that between 3000 and 4000 word

families are needed for 95% text coverage and between 6000 and 9000

for 98%.

In order to obtain the 98% coverage, it would be useful for learners to

dwell into Mid-frequency words after Low-frequency. Mid-frequency

words are generally useful but do not appear very often, but often enough

to be a sensible learning goal. Learners must also know how to

differentiate between mid-frequency and high-frequency words since, as

mentioned before, 6000 to 9000 plus proper nouns are required to reach

98% text coverage, it would be useful to know which word appear more

often. Mid-frequency are the 7000 word families from the third to the

ninth 1000, while Low-frequency are everything from the tenth and after.

Why 98%?

Because that is the text coverage of High-frequency and Mid-frequency

words in daily basic activities like reading a newspaper or novel, the 2%

that is excluded are the truly Low-frequency in the running words