The New General Service List, or NGSL, is a popular list of the 2800 most used words of English. Every student who wants to know English at an advanced level needs to know the words in this list well. Listen to find out how you can learn these important words!
Thanks for the episode, Tim. I’m very curious about these lists – what do they look like? Can you share a sample page and how you use them for your lessons with a fellow colleague:)? Off the top of my head, I could use them as a reference material for writing out lexical chunks for my students, give them certain items for self-study in class or at home. How do you incorporate these lists into your teaching?
Hi Elizaveta!
Yes, of course, I’m glad to help!
There are two kinds of lists- one is a predictive list which is created by linguists who sit down and decide which topics their students need to be able to deal with. Afterwards they decide which words are appropriate for what level the students are- A2, B1, etc. You can find Cambridge’s official A2 Key word list here:
https://www.cambridgeenglish.org/images/506886-a2-key-2020-vocabulary-list.pdf
The other type of word list is based on frequency- linguists analyze a large amount of text and calculate which words are used most often. They then draw up a list based on frequency; they also decide where the list ends by seeing at what point adding a word to the end of the list starts bringing diminishing returns. In the case of the NGSL, that’s at 2800 words. I will talk more about some of these word lists in a future episode.
You can download the NGSL from
http://www.newgeneralservicelist.org/
Look at the menu on the left, you’ll see several different NGSLs. The most useful one is NGSL 1.01 Version.
As to how I use these lists in class. Well, these lists alone are not terribly useful, except when you give them to students and ask them to go through them and cross out the words they know (or think they know!!!) so you can maybe focus on the ones they don’t.
I have written an entire dictionary for A2 Key with every meaning you’d need at that level- it’s about 1400 headwords. I’ll send you a sample; I also plan to put the dictionary up on Substack or Patreon so people can access the whole thing.
I’m working on a dictionary for the NGSL- it will be similar to the A2 Key one.
I am working on this alone, so I don’t have time to create textbook-style exercises. I ask students to read through the dictionaries word by word as if it were a normal book, and skip the meanings they did know and copy and paste the ones they do not know into a document and then write their own sentences for these new meanings.
I ask my students to do this work in class at minimum one time. I watch while they do it and ask for their reactions- if the number of new meanings is surprising, if they think they missed a lot of meanings before, etc. This is something I always try to do- ask students about their feelings and thought processes so I know how they think and how to help them.
Thanks again for listening- it means a lot to me!
Thank you, Tim, for a thorough and informative reply. I’ll need some time to go through all the websites. A dictionary is a good idea, since the lists alone don’t look like something students can work with. My university diploma project was about compiling a specific type of a dictionary, which my introverted self immensly enjoyed. Good luck with yours! Don’t forget to mark the episodes with a number) L
I almost forgot about lexical chunks! There is a list of the most used non-transparent collocations which is called the PHRASE list. Its frequency rankings are designed to be used with the NGSL. The list itself is hard to find, but here is a site where you can see all 505 collocations:
https://ejoy-english.com/go/wordstoreDetail/505-phrase-list/42e
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