What is the NGSL and How Can I Use it Teaching English?

A guide discussing the New General Service (vocabulary) List, its benefits for students and teachers, and practical ways to apply it in the classroom

The number of words in the English language is growing each year, and while there are over 600,000 words defined in the Oxford Dictionary, the average adult knows around 20,000 or more. So when you’re teaching English to second language learners, where do you start, and how do you get them to eventually learn and memorize so many words?

The New General Service List (NGSL) is a resource that every ESL teacher should be familiar with, as it can help you teach English to your students much more quickly when used correctly.

What is the NGSL?

The NGSL is a comprehensive list of 2,800 words that have been put together and published to help ESL learners learn and memorize the most frequently used words in the English language. It’s an updated version of the 1953 General Service List, which researcher Michael West created, and although this older list had a similar purpose, it was much more limited in scope and based on fewer words.

A group of linguistic experts first created the NGSL in 2013 by using software to analyze the Cambridge English Corpus, which is a massive data collection of billions of English words that have been compiled for research purposes by Cambridge University Press. Download NGSL

What are the benefits of using the NGSL?

• English skills are acquired more quickly by students
• Teachers can teach English much more productively
• Faster results mean satisfied clients and stakeholders
• Materials are easier to create with a ready list of words

How to incorporate the NGSL in your lessons

For your students to acquire the words listed in the NGSL, you should be using activities that not only incorporate these words but do so with lots of repetition. A learner must be exposed to a word anywhere between six to 20 times for it to sink in and stay memorized, depending on the complexity of the word, the learner’s cognitive abilities, and other factors.

Many of the activities that you can use for this are simple, tried-and-true methods that you might already be familiar with, though you’ll be ensuring you’re using NGSL words with each of these activities and they’ve been proven to lead to enhanced English language skills.

NGSL flashcards

Flashcards, also known as vocabulary cards, are the most commonly used method of directly teaching the NGSL to students. There are many activities that you can perform with your students using these cards, and they typically have target English words on one side of the card and either a picture or a translation of the word in the student’s native language on the other side.

How you carry out flashcard activities is up to you, as some teachers directly show the English words and/or pictures to students and ask the students to say the words aloud before flipping the card over to reinforce what the word means in the student’s L1 (their native language).

Others show the students the words in their L1 first and ask them to guess what the translated English word is before flipping the card over to show if they answered correctly or not.

Steps for creating flashcards on your own
1. Create evenly shaped squares on a sheet of paper (it may be easier to use resources that offer online printable flashcards, which are listed below).

2. Put the English word on one side of the card and a translation of the word in the student’s L1 on the opposite side of the card

3. On the side with the English word, you should also write the meaning of the word and a sentence or two in simple wording to show how the word is used in context.

4. Place a picture with each word whenever possible next to the word on the English side of the card, and it’s best to use cartoon images with younger students to maintain interest.

Tips for using NGSL flashcards

• Only introduce and use 15 words or less in each lesson, as students often can’t retain more information than this

• Provide words that are not similar to each other regarding both spelling and meaning, because this can confuse students by giving them more things they’ll have to contrast and compare

• Change the order in which you show the cards each time so that students are memorizing the words and their meanings instead of memorizing the words based on the sequence in which they’re shown

Resources:

Canva – a site that allows you to design and print your own flashcards and add words, images, or anything else you’d like to add to them.

Brainscape – another site that allows for flashcard creation but also has many pre-made flashcards which likely use words found on the NGSL.

Quizlet – a fun way for your students to access digital flashcards online and practice with them on their phones or computers at home.

Games

Any ESL vocabulary-based games that allow you to incorporate words from the NGSL into them can be highly effective at teaching these words to students. You’ll want to first introduce words from the NGSL to your students with a warm-up lecture, video, or another approach before playing any games. Below are some examples of classic games that you can use with NGSL words that are appropriate for all learner levels:

Word search

Create a traditional word search worksheet where a grid is filled with words and the letters are individually placed into grid squares, though, of course, you’ll want to use words from the NGSL list for this activity. To the right of the grid, you’ll want to provide a list of these words and try to keep it minimal to around 10 to 15 words.

Students will then search the grid looking for these words, and while they’re looking, they’ll probably occasionally glance at the word list repeatedly, which gives them a lot of exposure to the words with repetition. You can easily create your own word search worksheets online using NGSL terms, and when you’re ready, you can simply download them and print them out.

Pictionary relay

Pictionary is both a classic board game and one that you can play with your students in class using two different tables on opposite sides of the room. With Pictionary race, you’ll split your students up into two groups and assign them to their respective tables. You’ll then ask each group to nominate one student from their group to play the role of the artist, who is typically any student who can draw well or quickly.

You’ll then provide one of the words from the NGSL list to the two students playing the artist role and instruct them not to tell the other students what the word is. These two students will then return to the tables where their groups are and illustrate the word by drawing it on a sheet of paper as quickly as possible.

The other students in the group will simply watch and try to guess what the word may be based on the drawing, and the first group to guess correctly wins a point. The game is then repeated with the next word from the NGSL list.

Hangman

Here’s another classic (albeit morbid) favorite that students love with a focus on using words from the NGSL. Assign a word from the NGSL to a student who is standing at the board and ask them to draw several blank lines corresponding with the number of letters in the word.

Ask the other students to take turns guessing which letters are contained in the word. If a student guesses a letter correctly, then the letter is written on the blank line where it belongs.

For every incorrect guess, the student standing at the board draws one segment/body part of a hanging man. If a student (or team) guesses the word correctly before the hanging man is fully drawn, they win and the game is over, though if the hanging man is drawn first, nobody wins.

NGSL words within context: reading

Simply having your students read a story will often cover many of the words found in the NGSL, regardless of which story you choose. Keep in mind that the NGSL contains the words most frequently used and encountered in English-speaking contexts, and books are no exception to this.

To see this in action for yourself, you can choose any text that you’d like your students to read, and if you can find an online version of it that allows you to copy and paste it elsewhere, you can paste it into the following word frequency tool.

This tool will show you just how frequently specific words appear in the text, so not only can you verify that the text includes many NGSL words, but it can also help you plan your lessons around the stories themselves.

As you introduce new stories to students, you can then get an idea of what words you should focus on for each lesson with vocabulary flashcards and other supplemental activities.

Tips: whenever possible, allow your students to choose which stories they’d like to read, as this can motivate them more for reading. Also, if you want to ensure that the texts your students are reading are appropriate for their age or learning level, you can use Oxford Graded Readers, which have been designed with these factors in mind.

What’s next after teaching the NGSL?

While your students are learning words included in the NGSL, you should be assessing them along the way, which you can do with NGSL-focused quizzes. Once they’ve learned all 2,800 words included on the list, the next thing they should then learn are words that have special purposes, such as those used frequently for academic or business purposes.

To do this, there are three other lists available that you can then incorporate into your lessons and activities:

1. The New Academic Word List (NAWL) – 960 of the most frequently used words in academic English contexts. Download NAWL

2. The TOEIC Service List (TSL) – 1,200 words which, when combined with the NGSL, cover most of the vocabulary used in TOIEC study materials and tests. Download TSL

3. The Business Service List (BSL) – 1,700 words that cover the majority of words used in business English materials and scenarios when combined with the NGSL. Download BSL

Why these three lists?

The linguists who created the NGSL believe that special purpose words are the next most logical thing that students should learn because although there are billions of more words in the English language, many of which may be used more frequently than these special purpose words, the next few thousand words after the initial 2,800 high-frequency ones may not be quite as useful to students in practical scenarios as these special purpose words are likely to be.

Further reading

• New General Service List (NGSL) website
• New General Service List (NGSL) Wikipedia