Table of Contents
BEST Reading IELTS Academic Test 157
IELTS ACADEMIC READING TEST 157 – PASSAGE – 2
IELTS ACADEMIC READING TEST 157
READING PASSAGE – 2
Word lists
A. As any language learner knows, the acquisition of vocabulary is of critical importance. Grammar is useful, yet communication occurs without it. Consider the utterance: ‘Me station.’ Certainly, ‘I’d like to go to the station’ is preferable, but a taxi driver will probably head to the right place with ‘Me station.’ If the passenger uses the word ‘airport’ instead of ‘station’, however, the journey may wel1 be fraught.
Reading IELTS Academic Test
Similarly, ‘What time train Glasgow?’ signals to a station clerk that a timetable is needed even though ‘What time does the train go to Glasgow?’ is correct. In both of these requests, nouns – ‘station’, ‘time’, ‘train’, and ‘Glasgow’ – carry most of the meaning; and, generally speaking, foreign-language learners, like infants in their mother tongue, acquire nouns first. Verbs also contain unequivocal meaning; for instance, ‘go’ indicates departure, not the arrival.
Furthermore, ‘Go’ is a common word, appearing in both requests above, while ‘the’ and ‘to’ are the other frequent items. Thus, for a language learner, there may be two necessities: to acquire both useful and frequent words, including some that function grammatically. It is a daunting fact that English contains around half a million words, of which a graduate knows 25,000. So how does a language learner decide which ones to learn?
B. The General Service List (GSL), devised by the American, Michael West, in 1953, was one renowned lexical aid. Consisting of 2,000 headwords, each representing a word family, GSL words were listed alphabetically, with definitions and example sentences, while a number alongside each word showed its number of occurrences per five million words, and a percentage beside each meaning indicated how often that meaning occurred. For 50 years, particularly in the US, the GSL wielded great influence: graded readers and other materials for primary schools were written with reference to it, and American teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) relying heavily upon it.
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C. Understandably, West’s 1953 GSL has been updated several times because, firstly, his list contained archaisms such as ‘shilling’, while lacking words that existed in 1953 but which were popularized later, like ‘drug’, ‘OK’, ‘television’, and ‘victim’. Naturally, his list did not contain neologisms such as ’email’. However, around 80% of West’s original inclusions were still considered valid, according to researchers Billuroğlu and Neufeld (2005). Secondly, what constituted a headword and a word family in the West’s GSL was not entirely logical, and rules for this were formulated by Bauer and Nation (1995).
Thirdly, technological advance has meant that billions of words can now be analysed by computer for frequency, context, and regional variation. West’s frequency data was based on a 2.5-million-word corpus drawn from research by Thorndike and Lorge (1944), and some of it was unreliable. A 2013 incarnation of the GSL, called the New General Service List (NGSL), used a 273-million-word subsection of the Cambridge English Corpus (CEC), and research indicates this list provides a higher degree of coverage than West’s.
Reading IELTS Academic Test
D. A partner to the NGSL is the 2013 New Academic Word List (NAL) with 2,818 headwords – a modification of Averill Coxhead’s 2000 AWL. The NAWL excludes NGSL words, focusing on academic language, but, nevertheless, items in it are generally serviceable – they are merely not used often enough to appear in the NGSL. An indication of the difference between the two lists can be seen in just four words: the NGSL begins with ‘a’ and ends with ‘zonings’, whereas ‘abdominal’ and ‘yeasts’ open and close the NAWL.
E. Over time, linguistics and EF have become more dependent upon computerized statistical analysis, and large bodies of words have been collected to aid academics, teachers, and learners. One such body, known by the Latin word for body, ‘corpus’, is the CEC, created at Cambridge University in the UK. This well-known collection has two billion words of written and spoken, formal and informal, British, American, and other Englishes. Continually updated, its sources are very wide indeed – far wider than West’s. Although the CEC is one of many English-language corpora, it is not the largest, but it was the one used by the creators of the NGSL and the NAWL.
F. Still, a learner cannot easily access corpora, and even though the NGSL and NAL are free online, a learner may not know how best to use them. Linguists have demonstrated that words should be learnt in a context (not singly, not alphabetically); that items in the same lexical set should be learnt together; that it takes at least six different sightings or hearings to lea one item; that written language differs significantly from spoken; and, that concrete language is easier to acquire than abstract.
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Admittedly, a list of a few thousand words is not so hard to learn, but language learning is not only about frequency and utility, but also about passion and poetry. Who cares if a word you like isn’t in the top 5,000? If you like it or the way it sounds, you’re likely to lea it. And, if you use it correctly, at least your IELTS examiner will be impressed.
Questions 14-19
Passage 2 has six paragraphs: A-F.
Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B-F from the list of headings below.
List of Headings
i. English vocabulary is hard to lea
ii. Comparison of the NGSL and the NAWL
iii. Description of the GSL
iv. Utility and frequency should guide the choice of new lexis
v. Reservations about lists and corpora
vi. Learning the NAWL raises an IELTS candidate’s score
vii. Reasons for overhauling the GSL
viii. Benefits of the NAWL
ix. Advent of corpora
Reading IELTS Academic Test
14. Paragraph A
15. Paragraph B
16. Paragraph C
17. Paragraph D
18. Paragraph E
19. Paragraph F
Questions 20-24
Look at the following statements and the list of people on the following page.
Match each statement with the correct person or people: A-E.
20. He / She / They created the GSL.
21. He / She / They created the AWL.
22. He / She / They standardised headwords and word families.
23. He/ She/ They reviewed the GSL for content validity.
24. His/ Her/ Their early research was narrow.
Reading IELTS Academic Test
List of people
A. West
B. Billuroğlu and Neufeld
C. Bauer and Nation
D. Thorndike and Lorge
E. Coxhead
Reading IELTS Academic Test
Questions 25-27
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND / OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.
25. How many words are there in the complete Cambridge English Corpus?
26. At least how many times must a learner see or hear a new word before it can be learnt?
27. According to the writer, what else must there be a sense of for a person to learn a new word?
ANSWERS ARE BELOW
Reading IELTS Academic Test
Reading IELTS Academic Test
ANSWERS
14. iv
15. iii
16. vii
17. ii
18. ix
19. v
20. A
21. E
22. C
23. B
24. D
25. 2/TWO BILLION
26. 6/SIX
27. PASSION AND POETRY