Norbert Schmitt
Norbert Schmitt is an American-born applied linguist based in the UK and the most prolific vocabulary researcher of his generation after Paul Nation. He spent his career at the University of Nottingham, where he is now Emeritus Professor of Applied Linguistics, having retired from the chair in September 2020. Schmitt began as an EFL teacher in Japan in 1988 and turned to vocabulary research during his PhD years at Nottingham (1994–1997).
Where Nation built the frequency-and-coverage tradition, Schmitt widened the field's scope. He pushed depth of word knowledge, formulaic language, and statistical modelling into the centre of second-language vocabulary research. His 2011 paper with Jiang and Grabe in the Modern Language Journal challenged the discrete-threshold framing of lexical coverage by showing comprehension as a graded function of vocabulary knowledge, not a step at 95 or 98 percent.
Career
- PhD, University of Nottingham, 1994–1997
- Professor of Applied Linguistics at Nottingham; Emeritus from September 2020
- Sustained publication record across Applied Linguistics, Language Learning, Language Testing, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, and Language Teaching Research
Published Work
- Vocabulary in Language Teaching (Cambridge, 2000; 2nd ed. with Diane Schmitt, 2020)
- Formulaic Sequences (ed., Benjamins, 2004)
- An Introduction to Applied Linguistics (ed., Hodder, 2002; 3rd ed. 2019)
- Researching Vocabulary: A Vocabulary Research Manual (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
- "The percentage of words known in a text and reading comprehension" (with X. Jiang and W. Grabe), Modern Language Journal 95, 2011
Influence
- Pulled vocabulary research beyond word counting into formulaic language, depth of knowledge, and graded comprehension
- The 2011 Schmitt-Jiang-Grabe paper reset the conversation about coverage thresholds for materials writers and test designers
- Vocabulary in Language Teaching remains the standard MA-level introduction to L2 vocabulary