Developing the China Standards of English: challenges at macropolitical and micropolitical levels

Language Testing in Asia

Table 2 Requirements of English vocabulary sizes at different educational stages

Educational stage	Requirement of vocabulary size^a	No. of word families new to each list^b
Elementary (year 1–6)	700	404
Junior secondary (year 7–9)	1500	941
Senior secondary (year 10–12)	3500	1682
Non-English major undergraduate (basic)	4795	1204
Non-English major undergraduate (intermediate)	6395	1073
Non-English major undergraduate (advanced)	7675	1059

Notes. ^aThe information was obtained from the national curricula; ^bThe information was provided by Dr. Tan Jin and Dr. Baichuan Li (Language Data 2016, retrieved on February 12, 2016 at http://languagedata.net/lpa/); A word family is the base form of a word plus its inflected forms and derived forms made from affixes (https://en.wikipedia.org)