How many high frequency words of English do Japanese university freshmen`know\u27?

Knowledge of high-frequency vocabulary is essential to language fluency. However, there is more to knowing a word than simply knowing its meaning. Full vocabulary depth knowledge includes not only semantics, but also knowledge of a word\u27s phonology, orthography, collocations, word parts, grammar, constraints on use, concepts and referents, and associations.This research examined the extent of knowledge that a group Japanese university freshmen have of high-frequency English vocabulary. First, students were made to give judgments on how well they knew a list of 3,000 high-frequency English lemma. Then, items deemed as being known were examined to determine whether they functioned as a cognate between English and Japanese. Finally, a sample of the items marked as being known was tested in regards to the full range of vocabulary depth knowledge. The results of this study showed that while the students tested in this study are familiar with a majority of high-frequency English vocabulary, their vocabulary depth knowledge of these items is shallow. The results of this study should help guide teachers as to which aspects of vocabulary depth they need to concentrate on to help make language learning more efficient