With 600,000 words in the English language, second language learners have always struggled with which words to study. Research shows that understanding English texts is almost impossible if you know less than 90% of the words on the page. By utilizing Zipf’s Law, a model of frequency distribution, Dr. Browne and his team are developing a large and growing collection of short, corpus-based word lists know as the New General Service List Project. Each list offers between 90-99% coverage of texts, the highest coverage in the world for those genres of English. All of the word lists and learning resources are open-source and free.
Dr. Browne is Professor of Applied Linguistics and TESOL and developer of the EFL teacher-training program at Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo, Japan. His is a corpus linguist specializing in second language vocabulary acquisition, extensive reading skills development and online learning. He also serves as an English Language Specialist for the U.S. Department of State, supporting global teacher training. He has created multiple open-source, corpus-based word lists, delivered 50+ keynote and plenary speeches, and gave another TEDx talk in 2016 for TEDxTokyoTeachers.