在新东方，如果一位学员词汇基础较弱，老师通常会推荐学员背诵《雅思词汇胜经》中附录的“2000个最常用词汇”。而这份“2000个最常用词汇”是从1953年由迈克尔·韦斯特(Michael West)发布的“通用词汇表”(General Service List，GSL)改编而来的——原表将2284个通用词汇按照词频由高到低排列，“2000个最常用词汇”则改为按照字母顺序由A到Z排列。“通用词汇表”所含2284个词，是由迈克尔·韦斯特在前电脑时代，积20余年之功，在广泛参考前人及同代学者的成就的基础上，由250余万字的语料库中统计出的高频词汇。迈克尔·韦斯特的想法，是希望英语学习者能有一份表单，其中收录有英语中最常见、最常用的词汇，以方便他们的学习。也就是说英语学习者只要优先掌握了这些高频词汇，就能大体读懂英文了。

　　迈克尔·韦斯特的“通用词汇表”在很长时间里都具有相当的权威，然而随着时间的推移，这份词汇表的问题也越来越为人所识。首先，以250万字的语料库作为统计基础，在前电脑时代已是壮举，但是以今日的眼光来看，则未免有所不足。而也正由于作为统计基础的语料库不够庞大，统计所得高频词汇，是否真能当得起“通用词汇”之名，也就成了疑问。此外，时移世易，彼时的通用词汇，于今已未必通用，譬如先令(shilling)、鳏夫(widower);而今日通行的词汇，彼时尚未流行或尚未存在，如塑料(plastic)、电视(television)、电池(battery)等等。

　　所以推荐学员直接背诵《雅思词汇胜经》中附录的“2000个最常用词汇”是一个不失简便却未必最优的办法。我在这里向大家推荐“牛津3000”(Oxford 3000)，有想要短期快速积累阅读词汇的学生，不妨将它用作学习材料。

　　牛津3000是收录在《牛津高阶英汉双解词典》(Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary)附录中的一份单词表(网上可以找到电子版)，有关这份单词表的选词标准及用法，《牛津高阶》的编纂者有如下说明(对于与本文主旨相关的信息，我择要译述为中文供读者参考)：

　　The keywords of the Oxford 3000 have been carefully selected by a group of language experts and experienced teachers as the words which should receive priority in vocabulary study because of their importance and

　　usefulness. The selection is based on three criteria.

　　牛津3000所录核心词汇是经由一群语言专家与有经验的教师细心挑选出来的，这些单词应该在你的词汇学习中被放在最为优先的位置，因为它们既重要又有用。我们是基于三个标准选出这批词汇的。

　　The words which occur most frequently in English are included, based on the information in the British National Corpus and the Oxford Corpus Collection. (A corpus is an electronically held collection of written or spoken texts, often consisting of hundreds of millions of words.) H owever, being frequent in the corpus alone is not enough for a word to qualify as a keyword: it may be that the word is used very frequently, but only in a narrowly defined area, such as newspapers or scientific articles. In order to avoid including these restricted words, we include as keywords only those words which are frequent across a range of different types of text. In other words, keywords are both frequent and used in a variety of contexts. In addition, the list includes some very important words which happen not to be used frequently, even though they are very familiar to most users of English.