For targeting specific vocabulary lists like the NGSL in testable ways into each level of curriculum, check out Linguatorium. To my knowledge, it is the only spaced repetition software specifically designed to operationalize TEACHER-DIRECTED vocabulary acquisition -- and its modeling of each learner's and each word's "forgetting curve" is excellent as evidenced by a recent study using the software that won the 2016 Best Article Award from CALICO (the Computer-Assisted Language Instruction Consortium).

https://journals.equinoxpub.com/index.php/CALICO/article/view/26055

https://linguatorium.com/about/

Dear Monica,

I read your post with great interest re TEACHER DIRECTED vocabulary acquisition. Thank you for this. Our vocabulary team met today, and indeed have decided to use a list method for determining standards for each level in the curriculum. Lists, as units of analysis, seem to bring consensus from several stake holders, including administration above us, who are the ones actually reading AOL reports and winning grants with the results. We will have two lists for each level, one that aims for receptive recognition of NGSL frequency bands and a second list from our teaching materials that will require rigorous productive knowledge--seven ways of knowing each item. I am very excited to review Linguatorium and hope it could provide the transparency and control we need.

Paul Sevigny

Looking forward to your assessment of Linguatorium's potential for building your students' vocabulary in testable ways that meet your other stakeholders' needs as well. If it's not too much trouble, I would very much appreciate you keeping me updated on what your institution decides. Second language vocabulary acquisition is obviously SO important to students, their teachers, institutions, etc., that definitely it's vital we identify the BEST resources available at any given point in time for facilitating our students' optimal acquisition of target vocabulary!

Hi Paul. You bring up a perennial issue in vocabulary instruction: How can we create a unified set of vocabulary at a given level when learners, even of similar proficiency levels, might have different individual needs? No two learners come to the table with the same lexical profiles, meaning that the words they fully know, partially know, or don't know at all, might be very different between any two learners.

This might sound counter-intuitive, but sometimes I think mid-frequency words for lower-intermediate learners might be better than high-frequency words. I got this idea from Frank Boers in an article in which he said that high-frequency vocabulary, by virtue of being high frequency, will probably be learned through incidental exposure in the input anyway, and said that at least the argument could be made for the explicit instruction of mid-frequency words. I recall that Laufer went as far as to say that even low-frequency words should be, if not taught, at least studied intentionally at some point for very advanced learners. This is because if the frequency is very low, a learner will not encounter it enough to ever learn it.

How does this relate to your question? Well it seems to me when as educators we obsess over the first few thousand frequency bands of words, we inevitably run into the issue of targeting vocabulary that many students in the class already have a good grasp at understanding (at least receptively, if not productively). Also, given that most vocabulary instruction centers on the simple form-meaning link, the only students who truly benefit are those who don't know the word at all. Given that these words are very high frequency, they will likely be picked up at some point regardless. Therefore, how about going a bit beyond that when targeting lexica in the curriculum?

What I'm suggesting is that, when it comes to vocabulary, I think that (and this opinion is probably contrary to what many or even most might recommend), it's probably better to err on the side of slightly lower than higher frequency for a given "level" of student. Let me be clear, I don't mean LOW frequency, but slightly lower than what you would expect learners to need to know at a given proficiency. This will help ensure that most students will still be taught useful words (insofar as frequency is an indicator of usefulness), and it will minimize the number of words that are already known or partially known to the bulk of the class (as I recall we had the issue of the vocabulary being too easy when we were both at APU!)

Kris