What are the Knowledge-based Vocabulary Lists (KVL)?
The KVLs are the result of a collaborative research project supported by the British Council. Members of the English Language Research team and researchers from the University of Nottingham (UK), University of Innsbruck (Austria) and Waseda University (Japan) worked together to create innovative vocabulary lists that show the 5,000 words best known by learners of English.
What makes these lists different?
Over 100,00 learners from China, Germany and Spain took part in tests that measured their ability English language word knowledge to determine which words were known best. Learners were required to spell the words correctly, demonstrating a good level of mastery.
Using this data, researchers ranked the 5,000 words from easiest to most difficult for each of the three language backgrounds.
Why use the KVL?
These lists are useful for teachers, curriculum designers and test developers who want to know which words learner are most likely to be able to produce accurately. This gives a clearer picture of vocabulary knowledge than frequency lists that simply report on the frequency of English words.
What’s included on the KVL?
Each downloadable KVL (for Chinese, German or Spanish learners) includes:
- Lemma: the KVL uses ‘lemmas’ as their lexical unit. These are the base form of a word, along with it common grammatical forms (e.g. walk, walked, walking).
- Word class: whether the word is a noun, verb, adjective, etc.
- Knowledge rank order: how likely it is that learners from a given language background know a word well enough to spell it correctly.
- Frequency rank order: how often the word appears based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).
- Uncertain KVL ranking: words where there were less certainty in ranking, with more details provided in the KVL User Manual, Supplementary lists C and E (downloadable below).
Watch a 20-minute video introduction to the project by Professor Norbert Schmitt, Emeritus Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Nottingham.
For full details on how to use the KVL, download the KVL User Manual at the bottom of this page. You can also access the lists for Chinese, German and Spanish.