Sharoff S., Umanskaya E., Wilson J. - A Frequency Dictionary of Russian: core vocabulary for learners / Частотный словарь русского языка [2013, PDF, ENG]

A Frequency Dictionary of Russian: core vocabulary for learners

Год выпуска: 2013
Автор: Sharoff S., Umanskaya E., Wilson J.
Категория: справочник
Издатель: Routledge
Язык курса: Английский
ISBN: 978-0415521420
Серия: Routledge Frequency Dictionaries
Формат: PDF
Качество: Отсканированные страницы + слой распознанного текста
Кол-во страниц: 400
Описание: Частотный словарь для русского языка из серии Routledge Frequency Dictionaries

Frequency information has a central role to play in learning a language. Nation (1990) showed that the 4,000–5,000 most frequent words account for up to 95 per cent of a written text and the 1,000 most frequent words account for 85 per cent of speech.

Although Nation’s results were only for English, they do provide clear evidence that, when employing frequency as a general guide for vocabulary learning, it is possible to acquire a lexicon which will serve a learner well most of the time. There are two caveats to bear in mind here. First, counting words is not as straightforward as it might seem. Gardner (2007) highlights the problems that multiple word meanings, the presence of multiword items, and grouping words into families or lemmas present in counting and analysing words.

Second, frequency data contained in frequency dictionaries should never act as the only information source to guide a learner. Frequency information is nonetheless a very good starting point, and one which may produce rapid benefits. It therefore seems rational to prioritise learning the words that you are likely to hear and read most often. That is the philosophy behind this series of dictionaries.

Lists of words and their frequencies have long been available for teachers and learners of language. For example, Thorndike (1921, 1932) and Thorndike and Lorge (1944) produced word frequency books with counts of word occurrences in texts used in the education of American children. Michael West’s General Service List of English Words (1953) was primarily aimed at foreign learners of English. More recently, with the aid of efficient computer software and very large bodies of language data (called corpora), researchers have been able to provide more sophisticated frequency counts from both written text and transcribed speech. One important feature of the resulting frequencies presented in this series is that they are derived from recently collected language data. The earlier lists for English included samples from, for example, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, thus they could no longer represent present-day language in any sense.

Frequency data derived from a large representative corpus of a language brings students closer to language as it is used in real life as opposed to textbook language (which often distorts the frequencies of features in a language, see Ljung, 1990). The information in these dictionaries is presented in a number of formats to allow users to access the data in different ways. So, for example, if you would prefer not to simply drill down through the word frequency list, but would rather focus on verbs for example, the part-of-speech index will allow you to focus on just the most frequent verbs. Given that verbs typically account for 20 per cent of all words in a language, this may be a good strategy. Also, a focus on function words may be equally rewarding – 60 per cent of speech in English is composed of a mere 50 function words. The series also provides information of use to the language teacher. The idea that frequency information may have a role to play in syllabus design is not new (see, for example, Sinclair and Renouf, 1988). However, to date it has been difficult for those teaching languages other than English to use frequency information in syllabus design because of a lack of data.