earticle

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The purpose of the study was three-fold: 1) to analyze vocabulary size in English texts written for the secondary school English curriculum, 2) to examine the effects of 80% vocabulary control on vocabulary size in different sets of textbooks, and 3) to compare vocabulary size between CSATs and textbooks. The study compiled a million word corpus of curricular texts including textbooks, CSATs, and EBS books. RANGE program was used to analyze the vocabulary size and text coverage in the corpus. The results demonstrated that 4,000 to 5,000 words were needed to reach 95% text coverage of curricular texts, which is at odds with the myth that 3,000 words are enough for the school curriculum. The analysis of textbooks showed that a learner is likely to encounter 4,000 words through the textbooks, while acquiring less than 3,000 words if low-frequent words are excluded for consideration. Those 3,000 words were far short of vocabulary size necessary for CSATs, which required more than 5,000 words to reach 95 percent coverage. After all, the vocabulary control movement in the national curriculum produced a large difference in vocabulary size across textbooks, which does not ease the students’ vocabulary learning burden. The paper ends with suggestions for future directions for revision of the vocabulary control in the national English curriculum.