Upgrades: Tier 2 Words for Advanced Learners

An upgrade is a lexical recast: a coach says your idea back with one sharper, more precise word. Muy grande becomes enorme. Très fatigué becomes épuisé. It works best for advanced learners whose sentence is already correct, one word at a time.

The best upgrade words are what reading researchers call Tier 2 words. They're useful, wide-ranging words, more common in writing than in casual talk. Upgrades are planned for advanced learners in Edgewise. They are not live yet.

What is an upgrade?

Most coach feedback fixes something. An upgrade fixes nothing, because nothing is wrong. It takes a correct sentence and offers a better word for the same idea.

That makes it a recast, aimed at vocabulary. A recast says your sentence back with one thing changed (Lyster & Ranta, 1997). Here the one thing is a word.

Notice the pattern. Many upgrades replace very + a plain adjective with one stronger word. Big thoughts. Small sentences. Sharper words.

What are Tier 2 words?

Beck, McKeown and Kucan sort vocabulary into three tiers. Tier 1 holds basic everyday words. Tier 3 holds specialist words tied to one field. Tier 2 sits between: "wide-ranging words of high utility for literate language users" (Beck, McKeown & Kucan, 2013).

Their example is emerge. It is more typical of written language than of conversation, yet it is useful across topics.

Tier 2 is an English school idea

The tiers were built for children reading English. The framework has since been applied in classrooms with English learners (Calderón et al., 2005).

One intervention taught academic words to 476 sixth graders, 346 of them from language-minority homes. Students learned the taught words (d = 0.39). Gains were smaller for word-part awareness (d = 0.20) and only marginal for reading comprehension (d = 0.15). Effects were similar for English learners and native speakers (Lesaux et al., 2010).

That is child research, in English, in schools. A solo adult practicing Spanish is a different case. So treat Tier 2 as a useful idea, not a ready-made list.

Every language needs its own list

There's no official Tier 2 list for Spanish, French or Portuguese. A word that sounds formal in one language can be everyday in another, so English lists don't carry over.

Our practical stand-in is frequency. Aim for mid-frequency words: past the few thousand most common ones, but not rare or technical. A frequency dictionary for your language, or a learner's dictionary that flags frequency, gets you close.

Why upgrades get noticed

Grammar feedback often slips past learners. In one study, 10 English learners and 7 learners of Italian watched replays of their sessions and said what they had been thinking. They read feedback on words, meaning and sounds fairly accurately. Feedback on grammar was mostly not recognized as feedback (Mackey, Gass & McDonough, 2000).

An upgrade plays to that strength. You hear your own idea with one new word in it, and the new word stands out.

Delivery helps too. In adult English classrooms, recasts were more likely to be taken up when they were stressed and changed only one thing (Loewen & Philp, 2006). One word at a time is the rule for a reason.

Why precise words matter for speaking

You already understand more than you can say. Listening needs a smaller vocabulary than reading. At 95% word coverage, non-native listeners understood what they heard well. That works out to about 2,000 to 3,000 word families (van Zeeland & Schmitt, 2013). Nation's estimate for 98% coverage is higher: 6,000 to 7,000 families for spoken text and 8,000 to 9,000 for written text (Nation, 2006).

So an advanced learner can follow a lot of talk with the basics. The gap shows up in what they say. Upgrades push words from the listening pile into the speaking pile.

Word variety marks proficiency. Lexical diversity correlated with speaking and writing quality and with proficiency. It didn't hold in every subgroup, and topic familiarity affected it (Yu, 2010). In another study, four word measures together sorted 70% of texts by proficiency level: how common, familiar, easy to picture and varied the words were (Crossley, Salsbury & McNamara, 2012).

More words won't fix it. Better-chosen words help.

When should a coach upgrade?

Two conditions. The sentence is already correct, and the learner is advanced.

Correct first. If the sentence has an error, the coach should fix that first. Stacking a new word on top of a correction asks you to notice two things at once. More on correction in recasts.

Advanced learners. Recast-style feedback seems to suit stronger learners. In a study of adult English learners, intensive recasts helped the more advanced learners produce higher-level question forms (Mackey & Philp, 1998). In grade-6 classrooms, high-proficiency learners gained equally from recasts and prompts, while low-proficiency learners needed prompts more (Ammar & Spada, 2006).

One word per turn. The coach upgrades one word, says the sentence naturally and keeps the story going.

When an upgrade changes the structure

Some upgrades are not a simple swap. Take this Spanish pair from The Tortoise and the Hare:

Urgir works like gustar. The hare stops being the subject and becomes a la liebre le… That's a grammar change hiding inside a word change. It suits a B2 learner, not a beginner.

More upgrade pairs

Watch agreement. Exausto becomes exausta for the tortoise, and épuisé becomes épuisée.

For teachers, tutors and SLPs

An upgrade follows a familiar SLP habit: one target word, offered inside the learner's own meaningful sentence. For adult learners, reserve upgrades for sentences that are already correct, and offer one per turn. These are learning strategies borrowed from speech therapy and reading research. Learning a language is not a disorder, and neither is an accent.

FAQ

What are Tier 2 words? Tier 2 words are useful, wide-ranging words that are more common in careful speech and writing than in casual talk, like emerge. The term comes from Beck, McKeown and Kucan's vocabulary framework for English.

Is there a Tier 2 word list for Spanish, French or Portuguese? Not an official one. The tiers were designed for English. A practical stand-in is mid-frequency words: past the most common few thousand, but not technical.

What is a lexical recast? It's a recast aimed at vocabulary. The coach repeats your idea with one more precise word, and the rest of the sentence stays the same.

When am I ready for upgrades? When your sentences are usually correct and you can retell a story without getting stuck. If you're still fixing grammar, work on that first.

Does Edgewise give upgrades now? Not yet. Upgrades are planned for advanced learners. Today the coach builds on your sentences, comments, says things back right and slows down when you need it.

How many words do I need to understand spoken language? One study put it at about 2,000 to 3,000 word families for 95% coverage of spoken language. Speaking well at an advanced level takes more precise words on top of that.

Your next step: Try a story retell in Edgewise. Your first retell sets your level. Edgewise scores story structure and sentence building, including how many different words you use. Every round ends with your next piece: one specific thing to add next time.

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Related: How a good speaking coach responds · Recasts in language learning · Comprehensible input

Sources

1. Ammar, A., & Spada, N. (2006). One size fits all? Recasts, prompts, and L2 learning. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 28(4), 543–574. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263106060268
2. Beck, I. L., McKeown, M. G., & Kucan, L. (2013). Bringing words to life: Robust vocabulary instruction (2nd ed.). Guilford Press. Chapter 2 excerpt: https://www.guilford.com/excerpts/beck8_ch2.pdf
3. Calderón, M., August, D., Slavin, R., Durán, D., Madden, N., & Cheung, A. (2005). Bringing words to life in classrooms with English-language learners. In E. H. Hiebert & M. L. Kamil (Eds.), Teaching and learning vocabulary (pp. 115–136). Erlbaum. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781410612922-12
4. Crossley, S. A., Salsbury, T., & McNamara, D. S. (2012). Predicting the proficiency level of language learners using lexical indices. Language Testing, 29(2), 243–263. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265532211419331
5. Lesaux, N. K., Kieffer, M. J., Faller, S. E., & Kelley, J. G. (2010). The effectiveness and ease of implementation of an academic vocabulary intervention for linguistically diverse students in urban middle schools. Reading Research Quarterly, 45(2), 196–228. https://doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.45.2.3
6. Loewen, S., & Philp, J. (2006). Recasts in the adult English L2 classroom: Characteristics, explicitness, and effectiveness. The Modern Language Journal, 90(4), 536–556. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4781.2006.00465.x
7. Lyster, R., & Ranta, L. (1997). Corrective feedback and learner uptake: Negotiation of form in communicative classrooms. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 19(1), 37–66. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263197001034
8. Mackey, A., Gass, S., & McDonough, K. (2000). How do learners perceive interactional feedback? Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 22(4), 471–497. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263100004010
9. Mackey, A., & Philp, J. (1998). Conversational interaction and second language development: Recasts, responses, and red herrings? The Modern Language Journal, 82(3), 338–356. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4781.1998.tb01211.x
10. Nation, I. S. P. (2006). How large a vocabulary is needed for reading and listening? The Canadian Modern Language Review, 63(1), 59–82. https://doi.org/10.3138/cmlr.63.1.59
11. van Zeeland, H., & Schmitt, N. (2013). Lexical coverage in L1 and L2 listening comprehension: The same or different from reading comprehension? Applied Linguistics, 34(4), 457–479. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/ams074
12. Yu, G. (2010). Lexical diversity in writing and speaking task performances. Applied Linguistics, 31(2), 236–259. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amp024