In this talk, Charles Browne addresses the perennial problem of how English vocabulary is taught in Japan and introduces a concrete solution in the form of a corpus-derived list of high-frequency words called the New General Service List (published by Browne, Culligan and Phillips in 2013). These 2800 words represent less than 0.4% of the English language yet cover 92% of the words students will likely meet in their daily lives. After explaining the background behind this important list of words, Dr. Browne will then introduce a large and growing suite of free online tools he has developed to help learners, teachers, researchers and content developers to be able to better utilize these words.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx