Should You Learn English Words From Lists or From Context?

Should You Learn English Words From Lists or From Context?

Learn English words from both, because lists and context teach different things. Deliberate study with word lists or flashcards builds the link between a word and its meaning quickly. Reading and listening in context teach slowly, but they add spelling, grammar, collocation, and the feel of how a word is used, which a list leaves out.

The two methods have names in vocabulary research. Studying words on purpose, from a list, a flashcard deck, or a vocabulary notebook, is intentional or deliberate learning. Picking words up while reading or listening for meaning is incidental learning. Paul Nation, whose frameworks shape much of English vocabulary teaching, sums up the trade-off in a 2007 paper in Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching.

Small gains do not make reading a weak choice. The studies below show reading building knowledge of words that flashcards never touch, and they also show why words met only a few times in a book mostly slip away. The question for an English learner is less "lists or context" than how to split time between them, and the research gives a fairly specific answer to that too.

What Is the Difference Between Intentional and Incidental Vocabulary Learning?

Intentional vocabulary learning means studying English words on purpose, usually from lists, flashcards, or word cards. Incidental vocabulary learning means picking words up as a side effect of reading or listening for meaning. Intentional study is faster per hour; incidental learning is slower but teaches how words behave in real sentences.

The speed figures in that table come from the same 2007 paper by Paul Nation. For the reading side he used Rob Waring and Misako Takaki's graded reader study. For the list side he cited studies of learners memorizing English-first-language word pairs, which reached "around 35 words per hour, which are four or more times higher than the incidental rate."

Nation adds that the comparison is "not entirely fair", because reading and listening also bring content knowledge, skill practice, and enjoyment. The same applies to vocabulary games, whose mix of deliberate and incidental practice is weighed in do English learning games improve vocabulary.

How Many New English Words Do You Learn From Reading One Graded Reader?

Very few new English words survive from a single graded reader. In Waring and Takaki's 2003 study, learners read a 400-headword graded reader containing 25 invented target words. Right after reading they could translate 4.6 of the 25 on average. After three months that fell to 0.9, and words met fewer than eight times scored near zero.

The study, published in Reading in a Foreign Language, used the graded reader A Little Princess with 15 intermediate-level Japanese learners. The researchers replaced 25 words with invented spellings, so every target word was new, and set them at five frequencies, from once in the book to 15 to 18 times. The learners took about 56 minutes to read the book, at an average of 104.8 words per minute, and rated it easy.

Repetition mattered most. Words met 15 to 18 times were translated correctly 42% of the time immediately, but only 6% of the time after three months.

Waring and Takaki did not conclude that graded readers are pointless. They suggested judging graded readers also by how they "develop and enrich already known vocabulary", which is a different job from teaching new words. Choosing books at that comfortable level is covered in comprehensible input and your English reading level.

Can Reading an Authentic English Novel Teach You New Words?

Yes, if the words come up often enough. Ana Pellicer-Sánchez and Norbert Schmitt had 20 advanced Spanish learners of English read the novel Things Fall Apart, which contains 34 target words in an African language. Across all words, learners recognized 43% of meanings, but could recall the meaning of only 14% without a prompt.

The 2010 study, in Reading in a Foreign Language, tested four kinds of word knowledge: recognizing the spelling, recalling the word class, recognizing the meaning from choices, and recalling the meaning unprompted. Learning jumped once a word appeared ten or more times in the novel.

Source: Pellicer-Sánchez and Schmitt 2010, Table 2.

The authors flag one limit themselves: there was no delayed test, so the study shows what learners knew just after reading, not what they kept. Even so, reading an unsimplified novel taught spelling and grammar alongside meaning, which a translation-only flashcard does not test.

Their opening section is clear about where they stand on the wider debate: "intentional learning will always be the most effective approach", but there are practical limits to how many words can be taught explicitly, so learners also need what extensive input provides. Stories that recycle words on purpose, the approach in how to learn English through stories, raise the chance of those ten meetings.

How Many Times Do You Need to Meet an English Word to Learn It?

Around ten encounters is the figure the research keeps landing on, with full knowledge needing more. Stuart Webb's 2007 study in Applied Linguistics gave 121 Japanese learners of English target words in context 1, 3, 7, or 10 times. Each increase in repetitions produced gains in at least one aspect of word knowledge.

Webb's contexts were short, one or two sentences each, and Pellicer-Sánchez and Schmitt point out that unknown words in such short texts draw more attention than they would in a long book. In their own novel study, the dividing line fell between 5 to 8 exposures and 10 to 17. Waring and Takaki went further, estimating that most words in their graded reader would need "well over 20 or even 30 meetings" to be learned from reading alone.

The trouble is that ten meetings are hard to get for less common English words. Rarer words appear so seldom in normal text that a learner reading a few books may meet them once or twice, which is the stall described in how many English words you need to read and speak. A word list or flashcard deck closes that gap, because a planned review can supply the meetings a book does not. How many total study hours each CEFR level takes is laid out in how long it takes to learn English.

What Are English Word Lists and Flashcards Good For?

English word lists and flashcards are best for fast, reliable learning of the form-meaning link: seeing a word and knowing what it means. Paul Nation's 2007 paper reports deliberate study rates four or more times higher than the incidental rate from reading, and notes it works best when review sessions are spaced further apart.

Nation calls deliberate study of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation "language-focused learning", and he lists "learning vocabulary from word cards" as a typical activity. He cites "substantial evidence that deliberately learning vocabulary can result in large amounts of well retained useable knowledge". He also lists conditions for it to work, including deliberate attention, deep processing, and "spaced, repeated attention to the same features".

Lists suit three kinds of English words in particular:

• High-frequency words. The most common 1,000 to 3,000 word families make up most of any text, so learning them early pays off on every page. The 1000 most common English words list gives each one with a meaning and an example sentence.
• Words you need for a goal, such as academic or exam vocabulary from the advanced English vocabulary list.
• Words met in reading that will not come round again soon. A flashcard supplies the extra meetings.

Scheduling those reviews at widening intervals is the method explained in how spaced repetition builds English vocabulary retention. A list does not stop look-alike words such as affect and effect from blurring together, which needs the side-by-side practice in why English learners confuse similar words.

What Does Learning English Words in Context Teach That Lists Cannot?

Learning English words in context teaches the depth of a word: its spelling, its grammar, the words it goes with, and when it sounds natural. In Pellicer-Sánchez and Schmitt's 2010 study, words met 10 or more times in a novel were recognized by spelling 76% of the time and placed in the correct word class 63% of the time.

A flashcard pairs a word with a translation, so it mainly tests one part of word knowledge. Webb's 2007 study measured five parts, including spelling, associations, grammatical behavior, and meaning. Pellicer-Sánchez and Schmitt summarize his result: by 10 exposures, those aspects were known receptively for about seven of 10 target words. They conclude that studies testing several aspects show reading "can enhance a variety of word knowledge aspects", where meaning-only tests made it look less useful.

Context also works on words you already half know. One option Waring and Takaki set out for graded reader series is to provide "a rich input of already known vocabulary in various contexts and with a variety of collocations and colligations". A learner who knows the meaning of decision from a list still needs to meet "make a decision" in real sentences to stop saying "do a decision". Phrases whose meaning is not the sum of their words, covered in do idioms make you sound fluent in English, are almost impossible to learn any other way.

What Are Paul Nation's Four Strands of Language Learning?

Paul Nation's four strands are meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, language-focused learning, and fluency development. In his 2007 paper he recommends roughly equal time for each, which caps deliberate study of words and grammar at about one quarter of learning time and gives the other three quarters to using English for meaning.

Source: Nation 2007, The Four Strands.

The four strands answer the lists-or-context question directly. Word lists belong to one strand, language-focused learning, and Nation says that strand "should not make up more than one-quarter of the time spent on the whole course". Context learning runs through the other three. Nation justifies the three-to-one balance by the "focused efficiency" of deliberate study, which has to be balanced against meaning-focused strands that are less efficient for new words but more widely beneficial.

Nation also links the strands to each other: features studied deliberately "should also occur often in the other three strands of the course". A word on a flashcard should turn up in reading, speaking, and writing too. The fluency strand uses only known words, which is why rereading a book to build English fluency belongs there rather than in vocabulary study.

What Does a Combined List-and-Context Vocabulary Routine Look Like?

A combined English vocabulary routine spends about three quarters of study time reading, listening, speaking, and writing, and about one quarter on deliberate review. Use a word list for high-frequency words you do not know yet, read material where 95 to 98% of words are familiar, and move useful new words from reading into spaced flashcard review.

A week built on Paul Nation's four strands could run like this:

1. Read or listen most days at an easy level. Nation's conditions for meaning-focused input include large quantities of it and only 1 to 5 unknown words per hundred. He cites a calculation by Nation and Wang (1999) that learners need to read at least one graded reader every two weeks to get enough repetitions for substantial vocabulary growth.
2. Collect a few words per session. Note words that matter to the story and seem likely to come up again, with the sentence they appeared in.
3. Review them on a spaced schedule, about a quarter of your time. Add unknown words from the English vocabulary guide at your level, such as the B1 intermediate vocabulary list, so high-frequency gaps close faster than reading alone would close them.
4. Use the words. Retell what you read, or write a few sentences with this week's words, which is the meaning-focused output strand.
5. Reread something easy. A familiar story read faster builds fluency with words you already know.

The numbers set the expectations. After three months, Waring and Takaki's learners could translate 0.9 of the 25 new words in their graded reader, while words met ten or more times in Pellicer-Sánchez and Schmitt's novel had their meaning recalled more than half the time.