Numbers or Numerology? A Response to Nation (2014) and McQuillan (2016)
A sign of maturity in a scholarly discipline is the presence of ongoing debates, or, in really mature disciplines, titanic feuds (Gore Vidal and William Buckley Jr. Norman Mailer and Noam Chomsky, or closer to home B.F. Skinner and Chomsky) A small and hardly titanic instance of this form of exchange has taken shape in one corner of applied linguistics and was inadvertently launched by a 2007 paper of mine "Computing the vocabulary demands of L2 reading" It dealt with a question almost everyone in reading and vocabulary has had something to say about, whether reading alone can build an adequate reading lexicon in a second language, or whether some sort of extra vocabulary training will normally be required. Like the best debating topics, this one is riddled with definitional issues (What is adequate? that form some portion of the excitement. My paper was a simple corpus investigation with rudimentary tools of the readingalone question, not the in principle version but just the in fact one of why typical second language (L2) lexicons seem to plateau soon after about 2,500 or 3,000 word families, leaving readers with only 90% lexical coverage in the academic texts they must read, which is somewhat short of the 95% to 98% coverage research by Nation (2006) and others which have shown to be needed for comprehension.