How many words must students know for the HK DSE & for university studies in Hong Kong?
'The' is the most common word in the English language, with a frequency rank of 1. Past DSE English exams seem to have required students to be generally aware of the top 35,000 most common words in English. Exams also use a few words ranking up to around the 80,000th most common word.
For further information, have a look at the following links:
HK Vocab Study 1
HK Vocab Study 2 (22MB file, please be patient)
Quoting from one of these above studies:
'The vocabulary of an average native-English-speaking university student is about 17,000 word families (a word family being a baseword together with its derived forms, e.g. happy, unhappy, happiness), or as many as 40,000 different word types.'
That is a lot of words!
How many words do Hong Kong secondary students actually know?
My experience with Hong Kong's non-native secondary school students suggests a vocabulary of between 3,000 - 12,000 different word types.
Have a look at the following chart from one of the above studies, which shows the number of words that typical Form 6-7 students know. The words are grouped into the most common 2,000, the most common 3,000, the most common 5,000, and the most common 10,000 word families in English. There were 18 words tested in each set, with the chart showing how many words Hong Kong students knew when tested.
As you can see, the average Form 6 student in Hong Kong knew just 3 out of 18 words (17%) sampled from the 10,000 most common English word families. It is difficult to score well in the Form 6 DSE English exam with such a limited vocabulary. University students in Hong Kong only got 1.5 out of 18, as you can see in the chart below.
Strategy
Since the more frequent words appear more often, the fastest and most efficient way to increase your knowledge of relevant words is to learn the more common words first. This is exactly what we do at Triplican International. We do this via homework exercises where new words are learned regularly, and they are put to use in written and oral production every week.
Some examples of words appearing in each frequency range: test yourself
Below are samples of words appearing within different frequency ranges in English, as based on Peter Norvig's Google corpus. See how many you know from each range.
Sample from the 2,000 most common English words:
- conduct, network, numerous, trial, ought
Sample from words ranked between the 2,000th and 3,000th most common English words:
- scope, preceding, notion, firms, peculiar
Sample from words ranked between the 3,000th and 5,000th most common English words:
- dozen, intervals, cape, municipal, proposition
Sample from words ranked between the 5,000th and 10,000th most common English words:
- melancholy, transit, custody, breadth, pious
Sample from words ranked between the 10,000th and 20,000th most common English words:
- basins, vividly, pretext, longed, ideologies
Sample from words ranked between the 20,000th and 50,000th most common English words:
- maladies, ringed, defies, pith, coarsely
Sample from words ranked between the 50,000th and 80,000th most common English words:
- dunce, whizzing, cranking, coercing, artisanal
