An Introduction to Vocabulary Studies: Knowledge and Frequency

This chapter provides an overview of the main research area of the book, vocabulary. It intends to familiarise readers with three key notions in lexical studies: vocabulary knowledge, frequency and lexical coverage. It begins by addressing the lack of studies on primary school EFL learners. Then, it moves to explore the basic notions of what constitutes a word, leading to the introduction of the two main lexical dimensions: vocabulary depth and breadth. The chapter then goes on to examine the role of word frequency in vocabulary knowledge. Lexical items are defined and categorised based on frequency and genre typologies, and further organised into word frequency lists. The chapter concludes with the introduction of some key notions of lexical coverage, understood as the percentage of words needed to understand any given text, and provides a detailed summary of the findings in this area of research.