The first 25 most commonly used words make up about one-third of all printed material in English. The first 100 make up about one-half of all written material, and the first 300 make up about sixty-five percent of all written material in English.

To see how a limited and tightly controlled vocabulary and grammar can be used to tell an interesting story, please have a look at the first book in my Word by Word series of graded readers. Why not? It's FREE here: http://amzn.to/1Nh0M3Q


During thirty-five years of teaching English, I have been constantly reminded that one of the major constraints students face in achieving competent comprehension of the spoken and written language has been lack of sufficient vocabulary.

Students invariably ask, "What is the best and fastest way to increase my vocabulary?" Well, students could try to work through a dictionary and learn perhaps one page of words in a day. The problem with this approach is that the words in a dictionary are not arranged with the most useful words presented first. Instead they are presented alphabetically. This means that the first word is usually 'aardvark' (a word most students would never see or hear in their entire lifetimes).

The most common way teachers encourage students to increase their vocabulary is to have students read extensively. While they are reading, they should note down the new words they encounter and look them up in their dictionary. This approach is quite effective but again the new words encountered may not be the words students need to learn first.

Some teachers believe that students should not use a dictionary at all and that they should try to guess the meaning of new words from the context in which they appear. This process is known as 'inference'. The drawback with this approach is that, as research has shown, successful inference can only take place when the ration of known to unknown words is in the range of 50:1. Clearly, this approach is unsuitable to all but the most advanced students of English.

The 'Most Useful English Words' presents students and teachers with vocabulary that has been graded and ordered according to a combined scientific analysis of the words native speakers actually use in their speaking and writing. This analysis has drawn on extensive computer-based research carried out by Wellington University of New Zealand, the Oxford University 'British National Corpus' and a Google search and analysis of the words used on every page on the Worldwide Web, plus some words (names, etc.) needed to construct meaningful sentences and stories. This means that you can be sure that students are learning the most important and useful words before the less important, less useful words enabling much more rapid progress in learning the language.

To see how a limited and tightly controlled vocabulary and grammar can be used to tell an interesting story, please have a look at the first book in my Word by Word series of graded readers. Why not? It's FREE here: http://amzn.to/1Nh0M3Q