From 'postman' to 'podcast': how the words we teach English learners keep shifting
Open any English-as-a-foreign-language textbook from the 1970s and you'll meet a curiously frozen world. The postman calls at the door. Mother is in the kitchen. Father reads the newspaper. Children play in the garden. It's a vocabulary curated for a version of English-speaking life that, for many learners, was already a museum piece by the time they were memorising it.
Fast-forward to a 2020s coursebook and the furniture has changed. Learners now practise ordering food through an app, discussing screen time, and describing a podcast they like. The shift is not just cosmetic. The words we choose to put in front of language learners are a quiet form of cultural curriculum — a snapshot of what the people writing the syllabus think a competent English speaker needs to talk about.
A recent visual essay from The Pudding, flagged by Kottke, walked through exactly how those word lists have morphed over the decades. Around the same time, Japan announced it will set a national core English vocabulary list under new curriculum guidelines, and educators in the United States have been rethinking how they teach students learning English as an additional language. Read together, these threads say something interesting about where English teaching is heading — including here in Australia, where English learners make up a substantial share of every classroom.
Word lists are never neutral
Every language course rests on a decision that rarely gets discussed with students: which words are worth their time. There are hundreds of thousands of words in English, and even a highly fluent speaker uses only a fraction of them regularly. So course designers choose. And what they choose reveals their theory of what English is for.
The Pudding's analysis of how vocabulary lists have changed over time makes this vivid. Older lists lean heavily on domestic nouns, occupations that no longer dominate the workforce, and social rituals (visiting, letter-writing, calling on neighbours) that have quietly slipped out of daily life. Newer lists foreground technology, mobility, wellbeing, and a broader palette of identities and cultures.
None of that is accidental. A word list is a curriculum designer's bet on what a learner will actually need to say, hear, and read. When that bet gets stuck in the past, learners end up fluent in a version of English no living speaker uses — polite, formal, and slightly embalmed.
Japan's list-making moment
Japan's decision, reported by Japan Today, to set a national core English vocabulary list under new curriculum guidelines is a striking example of how seriously governments now take these choices. Rather than leaving individual publishers to decide which 2,000 or 5,000 words matter most, the state is stepping in to standardise the base.
There are trade-offs on both sides of that decision. A national list means every student, no matter which textbook their school adopts, walks out with the same core vocabulary — useful for exams, useful for measuring progress, and useful for teacher training. But a list also freezes a moment. Whatever words go on it will still be there in a decade, whether or not they still reflect how people speak. The risk is producing another generation of learners who know 'stationery' but hesitate on 'stream'.
The tension Japan is navigating is one every English-teaching system faces: the need for a stable syllabus versus the need for a syllabus that keeps up with the language as it's actually used.
English isn't owned by anyone anymore
The bigger backdrop is that English has become a genuinely global language, and its centre of gravity is no longer London or New York. Most conversations in English today happen between people for whom it is not a first language. That fact changes what 'good English' looks like.
You can see it in the vocabulary shifts. Older lists reflected a very British or very American life — specific foods, specific weather, specific social class markers. Newer lists tend toward what linguists call 'international English': words that work in a Zoom meeting between a Brazilian engineer, a Korean designer and a German client. Words about food delivery, remote work, mental health, climate, and social media travel better than words about hedgerows and drugstores.
This has consequences for how learners are assessed too. If the point of learning English is to communicate globally, then obsessing over whether a student says 'lift' or 'elevator' matters less than whether they can be understood by a room of speakers from five different countries.
'They're our kids': the shift inside classrooms
Alongside these curriculum shifts, the pedagogy has also moved. Education Week's recent piece, 'They're Our Kids': How Teaching English Learners Is Changing, captures a mood shift among educators: English learners are no longer treated as a separate cohort to be shunted off to a specialist and returned when 'fixed'. They're increasingly framed as everyone's students, integrated into mainstream classes, with subject teachers taking shared responsibility for their language development.
That framing changes what vocabulary teaching looks like day-to-day. Instead of drilling word lists in isolation, teachers weave vocabulary into science, history, maths and PE lessons. A word like 'evaporate' is taught where it actually lives — in a science experiment — not on a flashcard divorced from context.
For Australia, where a large share of students speak a language other than English at home, this integrated approach is especially relevant. In Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane classrooms, English learners aren't a niche — they're often the majority. Treating language learning as everyone's job, not just the EAL/D specialist's, reflects the reality on the ground.
What the changing lists tell us about ourselves
There is something faintly poignant about scrolling through decades of vocabulary lists. They read like a social history in miniature: the arrival of 'internet', the fading of 'telegram', the appearance of 'plant-based', the quiet disappearance of gendered job titles. If future historians want to understand what daily life felt like in a given decade, they could do worse than read the word lists we handed to newcomers learning our language.
The lists also expose our blind spots. Words about disability, neurodivergence, sexuality and non-Western cultures have entered mainstream lists only recently, and unevenly. Whatever a coursebook doesn't include is as revealing as what it does. A vocabulary list is, in the end, a rough map of what a society considers speakable.
Where this leaves learners — and the rest of us
For anyone learning English today, the practical takeaway is that no single list will future-proof your vocabulary. Language moves faster than curricula. The most useful words in 2035 will include some that no one has coined yet. Reading widely, listening to real speech — podcasts, films, group chats — and being willing to shed words that no longer earn their keep matters more than memorising a static list.
For those of us who already speak English, the changing shape of these lists is a useful mirror. The words a stranger is taught in order to talk to us say a lot about what we think our lives are made of. When 'postman' quietly gives way to 'delivery driver', when 'housewife' fades and 'carer' arrives, when 'phone box' vanishes entirely — that's not just a coursebook being updated. It's a culture editing its own self-portrait, one entry at a time.