A Modular Approach to Vocabulary Development
Although the NGSL was designed to help learners attain the highest possible coverage of general English with the fewest possible words, an important pedagogic question to consider is once these core, foundational 2800 words are mastered, what words should learners study next?
While continuing to study the next most frequency general English words beyond the NGSL seems a logical next step, two issues which the learner faces are (1) the number of words they need to learn to make an additional 1% coverage gain increases sharply after 92%, and (2) depending on the student's specialization, it is very likely that they will make significantly faster gains by learning special purpose vocabulary.
To that end, we have created 4 additional special purpose (SP) vocabulary lists that fit together perfectly with the NGSL (i.e. no overlap or repeating words), the New Academic Word List 1.2 (NAWL), the TOEIC Service List 1.2 (TSL), the Business Service List 1.2 (BSL), and the Fitness English List 1.2 (FEL). Each offers extremely good coverage within that specific domain and may be a useful next step for students with that goal. The efficiency of these lists can be seen the chart below which gives a rough estimate of coverage figures for each vocabulary list as well as the how the size of these lists compare with the overall vocabulary size of native speakers of English as well as the English language as a whole:
One thing that needs to be noted is that when trying to read or listen to materials within a special purpose genre, the coverage offered by the NGSL will be a little different from what it offers for general English (sometimes lower and sometimes higher than 92%). Downloads of all of our special purpose word lists and associated free online learning and content creation tools are available from this website via the dedicated page for that list.
We are currently working on 3 more SP lists which we hope to publish over the next year, including for TV English, TOEFL English and English Literature.
If you have been working on an SP list for your own program, and would like to make it available to the public, we would love to speak with you about the idea of including your list part of the NGSL Project. Please send an email to the address below or use our contact form at the bottom of our home page.