With more than 600,000 words in the English language and the average adult native speaker of English knowing about 30,000 of these words, vocabulary must seem an almost impossible challenge for 2nd language learners of English.

One of the major goals of the New General Service List Project is to help make the impossible possible by applying principles of corpus linguistics and science to creating short, focused lists of words for a wide range of genres, each offering the highest coverage in the world for that genre. All our lists available to the public as open-source materials that can be used and adapted as needed.

But our vision extends far beyond just making the world’s best word lists. We are also experts in teaching English as a second language, content development and online learning and are committed to making as many free online teaching and learning resources as possible.

For those who prefer to use ready-made commercial materials, we have also created a number of textbooks, workbooks and learning apps to help students learn these important words. Check out our NGSL Project Store to see teaching tools developed not only by us but the growing number of publishers, online learning companies and content providers.

Dr Charles Browne Professor of TESOL & Applied Linguistics at Meiji Gakuin University Director at CBC Consulting KK www.charlie-browne.com