How Many Words Do We Need to Know to Easily Read The Jakarta Post?

Author:

Furqanul Aziez

Bio:

Furqanul Aziez is a lecturer at Muhammadiyah University of Purwokerto, Indonesia. He has been teaching for the university for twenty one years. He mostly teaches on BA and MA courses in Lexical Study, Language Testing, and Innovations in Education. His main research interests include vocabulary, TEFL, and language testing.

Abstract

This study examines how many words Indonesian readers need to know to easily read and understand The Jakarta Post, a national English newspaper. A number of proportionally selected texts from the newspaper are used to create a corpus. The corpus will be compared to the top 2,000 high-frequency words from the British National Corpus and the British National Corpus 1^st – 20^th 1000 high frequency word families. The results will show us how many words do the readers need to know to attain the 95% coverage and how many more words they need to know beyond the top 2,000 most frequent words to successfully read the newspaper. The study will hopefully inform the newspaper of the vocabulary content of the paper for further consideration in increasing its readability.

Keywords: newspaper, readability, BNC, word families, coverage

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