An improper assumption? The treatment of proper nouns in text coverage counts
Dale Brown · Reading in a Foreign Language · 2010
The calculation of text coverage, that is the proportion of a text covered by a vocabulary of a given size, has become a standardized procedure in recent years. Such calculations provide important information for research and pedagogy about issues such as the goals of vocabulary learning and the ease or difficulty of particular texts. Chujo and Utiyama (2005) have pointed out that it is important to ensure that methodological issues involved in such calculations are properly addressed, and their research delineates the vocabulary size, sample size and text length needed to secure reliable results. However, one methodological issue that remains open to debate is how to deal with proper nouns. In studies of text coverage it has become standard practice to assume that proper nouns cause no problems for second language (L2) readers. Recent studies include comments such as, “assuming that proper nouns are easily understood, ” (Nation, 2006, p. 70); “if we... assume that the proper nouns in the discourse are known, ” (Schmitt, 2008, p. 330); and “if we assume that proper nouns... have a minimal learning burden ” (Webb & Rodgers, 2009a, p. 345). In fairness, there is occasional recognition that proper nouns can be problematic for learners and that it is essential that learners are able to recognize them (Webb & Rodgers, 2009b). Nevertheless, the general tendency is clear: These papers acknowledge the assumption, but proceed with minimal