抄録
This study attempts to clarify the difference between word frequency and word difficulty for Japanese EFL learners. The first experiment is designed to investigate learners' vocabulary knowledge at each frequency-band based on JACET 8000. The subjects took a bilingual computerized vocabulary size test and their scores were analyzed according to the frequency bands from Level 1 to Level 8, each level containing 1000 words. The results show that frequency bands can provide an implicational scale for the difficulty of words up to Level 4. Beyond Level 5, however, the scores for each level remained the same. The second experiment asked 40 English teachers about the difficulty of the target words used in the first study. The results showed that the number of the words judged as "difficult" by more than three of the teachers increased gradually up to Level 4, but beyond this level the number of difficult words in each level remained the same. However, when we took a different data analysis approach by modifying the definition of "difficulty" to "judged as such by more than 50% of the teachers", we discovered a conflicting result; the "difficult" words continued to increase even after Level 4. Conclusions are drawn about these two apparently contradictory results.
