2026 Cherry Award Finalist Public Lecture: Jamie Rankin, Ph.D.

Lecture Synopsis

Anyone who has learned a new language knows how hard it is to get past the small-talk phase and develop real fluency. For many, the main obstacle is not grammar or pronunciation, but the overwhelming amount of vocabulary to be learned. After all, most native speakers have a functional vocabulary of roughly 12,000 words by the time they’re in high school. That’s a lot of flash cards. And while textbooks do their best to help, there’s a fundamental discrepancy between the way most textbooks teach second language (L2) vocabulary and what the research on Second Language Acquisition (SLA) recommends. 

Three questions arise from that mismatch: 

• How many words do you actually need to know?
• Which words should you learn first?
• And what’s the best way to learn them? 

There are, in fact, effective approaches and tools available, and the presentation will walk you through these and provide hands-on experience in using them, including options with ChatGPT. So if you can, please bring a laptop with you.

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