How the Words We Teach English Language Learners Changed
A comparison of two essential vocabulary lists for English learners, from 1953 and 2023, reveals a dramatic shift: words like 'telegraph' and 'tobacco' dropped out, while 'computer' and 'mortgage' were added. The new list is more abstract, with fewer concrete words and more adverbs. This reflects a move from a hands-on, local world to a more systemic, institutional one.
Bread survived both lists. Flour, wheat, harvest and bake didn’t. The word for what sustains us remained essential, while the words for how we’d make it weren’t.
- crazygringo
I tried to organize vocab by difficulty level for an English language-learning app once.
It shocked me how there is absolutely no "right" answer.
If you are teaching English for travel, then you're prioritizing a lot of stuff around bathrooms, transportation, menu items, etc.
If it's for understanding TV, it's a lot of words like "murder", etc. Depending on which TV shows you want to understand.
If it's for reading the newspaper, you don't ever need to know "bathroom", but you sure do need to know words like "congressman".
While if you are living somewhere, it's really important to know a lot of basic supermarket items that you wouldn't prioritize for other usages.
Also, while it's easy to calculate word frequencies for stuff like newspaper articles, there aren't any good statistics (last I checked) around just normal everyday conversation. Because that stuff isn't getting recorded and transcribed. And the substitutes -- transcribed speech from TV, radio, podcasts, etc. -- is not the same context as the random stuff you say at home and during an average day.
- Frieren
> The “Social-Communicative” level barely changed in size. But nearly a quarter of the words in the 1953 list are gone, and 39% of the 2023 words are new. Humble, loyalty, fellowship, generous, polite, and companionship gave way to community, identity, organization, ethnic, gender, and narrative. ...It offers fewer words for the people directly around you, but more for belonging at a distance.
I would blame inequality on this one. In a more unequal world tribalization is a survival strategy and language follows.
When you see everybody else as your equals then focusing on describing that individual person, instead of their group, makes more sense.
Economic inequality affects deeply how we think about others.
- ninjahawk1
When I was in high school at a private school, I was surrounded by students who were religious but didn’t have much curiosity. I got into a debate with basically my whole class about how languages shift and change over time, and everyone was saying that languages stay the same and that they were all determined at the Tower of Babel.
I used the examples of Latin to Spanish and English, or Old English to new English.
I say that to say, languages changing over time is to some people not actually something they believe happens. The facts are right there in front of you, but some people cannot have their minds changed no matter how much sense you make.
- anymouse123456
Useless, obnoxious, absolutely frustrating Scrolljacker? Straight to jail.
- kuboble
I tried to build a similar list myself for German and it's not easy as just taking a lot of content and counting frequency. I also haven't found existing curated lists of most useful vocabulary.
There are some databases but e.g. they are biased towards Wikipedia and web which makes some very obscure words at the top of popularity (like some technical words which are present on each wiki page like Datenschutz or Impressum).
- azangru
All that time spent programming those visuals. Which, I think, ironically, have made the article harder to read, not easier.
- vanderZwan
The author mentions various categories grew or shrank, but always in percentages. Since the list also grew from 2300 to 2800 words that feels like it might distort things a bit: in absolute word count, a category that shrank by 1% lost fewer words than a category that grew by 1% would have gained, no?
Having said that, the categories that shrank all did so by a big enough percentage to also shrink in absolute number of words, so at least that isn't a problem.
- Jtarii
always hated this style of web presentation.