Students entering university with a vocabulary of less than 3,000 words - other institutions expected to be just as bad
Chinese University students know fewer than 3,000 English words, which is 'woefully inadequate' for academic study, according to a report.
The results of the survey of 155 first-year undergraduates' English vocabulary were revealed at the South China Morning Post's Teachers' Forum last Saturday.
Research supervisor Arthur McNeill, director of CUHK's English Language Teaching Unit, said the results were 'very worrying' and cited international research, including a 1989 study by Professor Batia Laufer of the Department of English Language at the University of Haifa in Israel, that indicated about 5,000 English words were required to guarantee comprehension of university reading material.
'I am alarmed to find that students are entering university knowing fewer than 5,000 words,' he said. He expected similar results in other universities as CUHK students had comparatively high use of English scores in Form Seven.
'This is a sad result and woefully inadequate. The vocabulary goals need to be much higher,' he said, adding that the average native English-speaking student was conservatively estimated to know at least 20,000 words.
With fewer than 3,000 words, students would have difficulty using English for academic study. While they could still get their degrees by developing coping strategies for the words they did not know, their limited vocabulary would hinder more fundamental understanding of their subject.