Estimating the vocabulary sizes of English learners around the world

Vocabulary

— Carr (1934) Vocabulary Density in High School Latin,
p. 323

— Meara (1980) Vocabulary Acquisition: a neglected aspect of language learning, p. 221

Vocabulary Size

What does it mean to know a word

• academic tests
  • Lemhöfer & Broersma's LexTALE
  • Brysbaert's #WordOrNot test
• for fun tests
  • Test Your Vocab
  • A Real Me: Online English Vocabulary Size Test

Users

Learners

Find your vocabulary size

Teachers

Teacher account

Vocabulary Size Norms

So far:

• 542,600 public results
• 222 locations
  • 1 from Cook Islands
    • population \(\approx 18,000\)
• teacher sessions
  • 1,200 accounts
  • 3,500 session
  • 42,000 results

English speakers

Korean speakers

German speakers

Spanish speakers

Indonesian speakers

Vietnamese speakers

Arabic speakers

Japanese speakers

Chinese speakers

Russian speakers

Technology Stack

Languages

• PHP custom MVC framework
• MySQL with custom ORM
  • \(\approx5\)GB of results
• JavaScript
  • heavy reliance on jQuery

Hosting

• shared hosting account
• 92MB RAM limit(!)
• \(\approx1\)GB storage (mostly logs)
• Apache server

CDN

• poor man's CDN
  • mostly dynamic content: my.vocabularysize.com
  • static content: vocabularysize.net
  • probably not necessary now with HTTP/2
• CloudFlare for static content
  • bandwidth per month: \(\approx3\)GB
  • requests: \(\approx5\times10^{5}\)
  • visitors: \(\approx2.5\times10^{4}\)

Traffic

Cost

Challenges

Hackers Gonna Hack

— Battat (2016) Solving the "English Vocabulary Size" Test

Solution

Form data:

identifier:  639887
question_id: 57
_nonce:      fdf15ddaf33a5402d54fc3a6c220f0a985f9e503
selected:    1
time_diff:   1579
submitted:   1

Limited Resources

• shared hosting
• 92MB RAM

Solution: doNext() (dumb, but works)

public function doNext () {
    // validate and store response
    if ($this->inputValid('test_' . $this->session->Test->getSchema())) {
        $status = $this->session->Test->storeSubmittedQuestion($this->_sanitized);
        if (true === $status) {
            $this->session->Test->loadNextQuestionSet();
        }
    }
    // get next questions
    $question_set = $this->session->Test->getCurrentQuestionSet();
    // run out of questions, clean up and close session.
    if (null === $question_set) {
        return $this->_completetTest(true);
    }
    // render each question
    foreach ( $question_set as $id => $question ) {
        $question->template = $this->_buildTemplatePath($question->template);
        $this->html[$id]    = Template::getInstance()
                            ->generate($question->template, $this->defaultData());
    }
    return $this->respond();
}

Group Administration

• order of questions randomized (sort of)

PII

• by default, tests collect generalized demographic data
  • birth month and year
  • gender (male, female, other)
  • native language
  • time spent learning English
  • time spent living in an English-speaking country

How to identify students?

• teachers can add PII questions to their test sessions
• these data are only available to the session creator
• when a session is deleted, the PII is also deleted

External Resources

Automatic translation

• no translate

but…

Why Test

— Godwin-Jones (2019) IALLT January Webinar 2019: Vocab Learning and Beyond-Using Quizlet in the FL Classroom

Use of vocabulary size

The only problem: It doesn't work.

Summary

• learn more words
• when studying a foreign language, learn even more words
• measure your progress every year or two
• don't cheat when measuring your progress
• don't stop until you die