Norbert Schmitt


Norbert Schmitt is an American linguist and a Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom. He is known for his work on second language vocabulary acquisition and second language vocabulary teaching. He has published numerous books and papers on vocabulary acquisition.

Research

In an article published in Applied Lingusitics in 2003 along with Svenja Adolphs, Schmitt found that more vocabulary is necessary to engage in daily spoken discourse than it was previously considered. For instance, Schonell et al. claimed that 2,000 word families are enough to cover 99% of spoken discourse. However, Adoplphs and Schmitt found that 2,000 word families can cover less than 95% of daily spoken discourse by analysing a modern spoken corpus. In a second study, the authors found that to cover 96% of the spoken discourse 5,000 individual words were necessary by analysing the British National Corpus.

Publications

Schmitt has published in several major journals including Applied Linguistics, Language Learning, Journal of Second Language Writing, Language Testing, System, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Language Teaching Research, Language Teaching, and Second Language Research.

Books