Limitations and Directions of Criminal Justice

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             2.2 Maximizing Volume .
             These experiments provide unequivocal evidence that frequent reading encounters "work"; meeting words often makes it possible for learners to engage in the crucial process of formulating and testing hypotheses about meanings. We saw that even when R and W met words in the same contexts, their knowledge of the items grew substantially over the course of repeated encounters. We have also shown that R and W profited from meeting the words often, regardless of whether they were important to the story or occurred in information-rich contexts. An obvious implication of these findings is that we should encourage L2 learners to read as much as they can, so that they increase their chances of meeting new words and, importantly, their chances of meeting them repeatedly. It is important that language courses include an extensive reading component, since the number of words intermediate and advanced learners need to know is larger than direct instruction can tackle.
             However, direct vocabulary instruction does have an important role to play in making L2 reading more efficient for beginning learners. Analyses of large corpora (Nation, 1990; Nation & Waring, 1997) indicate that a person who knows the meanings of the 3000 most common words of English should be able to understand 95 percent of the words that occur in a typical English text. Work by Laufer (1989, 1992) with ESL readers has suggested that knowledge of these 3000 items represents a threshold figure for reading comprehension. In other words, without knowledge of this core vocabulary, reading a normal unsimplified English text is a laborious and painstaking exercise since the learner does not know enough words in surrounding contexts to work out the meanings of problem items. .
             It follows that the best way of bringing beginning learners to the point where they can actually do significant amounts of comprehension-focused reading (and infer meanings of new words along the way) may be to ensure that they achieve mastery of the 3000-word high-frequency core of the language.