Word Lists

The possibility of compiling electronic corpora, as of the second half of the last cen­tury, has provided new opportunities for vocabulary research. This has also resulted in the devel­op­ment of a series of computer software solutions for the lexical analysis of texts and the building of vocabulary lists for language learners. In this article, the differences in building tech­nical vocabu­lary lists according to their frequency and keyness in corpora of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) are discussed. Both criteria have been discussed in terms of their benefits and limitations, and the possibilities of the most convenient combination of both. Finally, the word frequency list has been upgraded with keywords to provide a more comprehensive, but still very attainable, word list suitable for building a bilingual glossary or to be extended into a dictionary. Keywords: word list, frequency, keyness, keywords, corpus, marine engineering, English, lexis, vocabulary

Considering the importance of adequate understanding of instruction books and manuals on board vessels all over the world, as well as the challenges it imposes to the English language teachers and course designers, this paper aims to answer important research questions in relation to the quantity and type of vocabulary required for their adequate reading comprehension. In this study we use the method of Lexical Frequency Profiling and the software developed by Anthony Laurence – AntWordProfiler 1.4.0w. The corpus is comprised of 1,769,821 running words obtained from instruction books and manuals of various ship and machinery types. The results of this study point to the high technicality and lexical demand of the corpus, which calls for a highly technical English courses’ design and further research in marine engineering (English) vocabulary. Additionally, the research findings point to the need of creating a marine engineering-specific word list.

The present study examined which methods of vocabulary coding are more effective for learner’s long-term retention. 36 pre-intermediate English learners formed one control and two experimental groups. The experimental groups received target words in different vocabulary coding methods. No treatment was used in the control group. There were seven sessions, including a session for OPT (Oxford Proficiency Placement Test), a session for Pre-test (to check if the
students were unfamiliar with the words), and four instructional sessions in which the words were taught through DCT method to 12 females, ACT model to 14 Males (who formed the experimental groups), and through definition to 10 females (who formed the control group). After each instructional session an immediate post-test was given to check if the vocabularies were transferred to students' short term memory. In the seventh session which was held two weeks after the sixth session, the students were given a delayed post-test to check if the words were transferred to their long-term memory.
The results showed that participants in DCT and ACT groups outperformed participants who received no coding method. The students in DCT group
outperformed those other groups in vocabulary short-term and long-term
retention. In other words, the analysis showed that the students using DCT method had a higher level of retention in learning in comparison to those using the ACT model in vocabulary retention.
Keywords: Dual-Coding Theory, Adaptive Control Thought, Long-Term
Memory, Short-Term Memory.

Abstract
The present study examined which methods of vocabulary coding are more
effective for learner’s long-term retention. 36 pre-intermediate English learners
formed one control and two experimental groups. The experimental groups
received target words in different vocabulary coding methods. No treatment was
used in the control group. There were seven sessions, including a session for OPT
(Oxford Proficiency Placement Test), a session for Pre-test (to check if the
students were unfamiliar with the words), and four instructional sessions in which
the words were taught through DCT method to 12 females, ACT model to 14
Males (who formed the experimental groups), and through definition to 10
females (who formed the control group). After each instructional session an
immediate post-test was given to check if the vocabularies were transferred to
students' short term memory. In the seventh session which was held two weeks
after the sixth session, the students were given a delayed post-test to check if the
words were transferred to their long-term memory.
The results showed that participants in DCT and ACT groups outperformed
participants who received no coding method. The students in DCT group
outperformed those other groups in vocabulary short-term and long-term
retention. In other words, the analysis showed that the students using DCT
method had a higher level of retention in learning in comparison to those using
the ACT model in vocabulary retention.
Keywords: Dual-Coding Theory, Adaptive Control Thought, Long-Term
Memory, Short-Term Memory.

This paper describes a computerized alternative to glottochronology for estimating elapsed time since parent languages diverged into daughter languages. The method, developed by the Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP) consortium, is different from glottochronology in four major respects: (1) it is automated and thus is more objective, (2) it applies a uniform analytical approach to a single database of worldwide languages, (3) it is based on lexical similarity as determined from Levenshtein (edit) distances rather than on cognate percentages, and ( ) it provides a formula for date calculation that mathematically recognizes the lexical heterogeneity of individual languages, including parent languages just before their breakup into daughter languages. Automated judgments of lexical similarity for groups of related languages are calibrated with historical, epigraphic, and archaeological divergence dates for 52 language groups. The discrepancies between estimated and calibration dates are found to be on average 29% as large as the estimated dates themselves, a figure that does not differ significantly among language families. As a resource for further research that may require dates of known level of accuracy, we offer a list of ASJP time depths for nearly all the world's recognized language families and for many subfamilies. The greater the degree of linguistic differentiation within a stock, the greater is the period of time that must be assumed for the development of such differentiations. (Sapir 1916:76) Glottochronology, as formulated by Morris Swadesh (1950, 1955), is a method for estimating the amount of elapsed time since phylogenetically related languages diverged from a common ancestral language. This approach involves determining the percentage of words that are cognate in a standard list of basic vocabulary. Working with the assumption that words

Seetzen's word lists of African languages, compiled during his stay in early 19th-century Cairo, contributed to the expanding interest in global linguistic diversity at the time but were long overlooked and only recently rediscovered as historically significant. This paper examines his encounter with Tigriñña-spoken in the northern Ethiopian highlands and modernday Eritrea-which was then virtually unknown to European scholars. His documentation drew on Cairo's multinational diversity and Egypt's wideranging connections, based on conversations with travelers from Northeastern Africa, including a Tigriñña speaker. The dialect, likely from central Tigray and influenced by Muslim terminology, contains valuable cultural insights. Notably, the word list includes geographic and ethnic references that reflect an 'oral geography' still relevant today, as recent research confirms.

With the importance of formulaic language now widely recognised, several lists of formulaic sequences for L2 pedagogical purposes have been developed. This paper reports on a critical appraisal of ten such lists with the aim of assisting language educators in understanding their characteristics, their strengths and weaknesses, and any issues common across the lists. Factors related to the processes undertaken in producing each list and features of the final products themselves were examined. The lists were found to fall into two categories: resource-oriented lists, seemingly intended mostly as a resource for teachers, materials writers and curriculum designers, in which the process of item identification was central; and learner-oriented lists, which displayed a focus on providing a user-friendly product. Notably, no list combined a rigorous selection process with user-friendly features. Moreover, each was focused on formulae of a single type and thus none captured the broad scope of formulaic language.

When learners can comprehend 98% or more of the tokens within a text, the lexical difficulty of the text is unlikely to inhibit reading comprehension . This phenomenon will be referred to as the Coverage Comprehension Model (CCM). The CCM is present in countless articles that describe the percentage of tokens necessary to comprehend reading materials (e.g., . Further, numerous studies operationalize the CCM to provide evidence that participants were able to comprehend reading materials (e.g., Feng & Webb, 2020) by estimating (a) the lexical difficulty of a text and (b) the lexical mastery level of a learner. However, the validity with which the CCM is operationalized is limited by the following four assumptions; (a) 26 out of 30 words on a levels test is an appropriate threshold for mastery of a 1,000-word band; (b) the word counting unit used when estimating the lexical difficulty of a text and the lexical ability of a learner is appropriate for the target learners; (c) the item format used in levels tests can appropriately capture the type of vocabulary knowledge necessary when reading; and (d) the number of items on a vocabulary levels test accurately represents the difficulty of the 1,000-word band. This paper applies the findings of research to evaluate the validity of the first two assumptions, and concludes that the validity with which the CCM is operationalized in research is limited.

Izdelava seznama besed za množično raziskavo razširjenosti slovenskih besed Članek predstavlja metodologijo izdelave seznama besed za množično raziskavo razširjenosti slovenskih besed. Pri oblikovanju seznama so bili uporabljeni geslovniki treh razlagalnih slovarjev slovenskega jezika: druge izdaje Slovarja slovenskega knjižnega jezika, eSSKJ in Sprotnega slovarja slovenskega jezika. Izbor besed je bil omejen z izbranimi merili, med drugim z dolžino besed in korpusno frekvenco ter z izločitvijo lastnih imen. Končni seznam obsega 79.413 besed in zajema sodobno občno besedje. Seznam je uporabljen v preizkusu besedišča, s katerim bodo pridobljeni podatki o razširjenosti besed, tj. o deležu govorcev slovenskega jezika, ki poznajo posamezno besedo. Rezultati bodo prispevali k boljšemu razumevanju mentalnega leksikona govorcev slovenščine.

Ce catalogue présentant le travail de Valérie Belin est un très bel objet comportant des réminiscences, échos au Unheimliche, étrange inquiétude, concept freudien. Le synonyme de celui-ci est la hantise. Les séries présentes dans le catalogue sont mises en résonnance avec des œuvres issues des collections du musée de Bordeaux choisies par la photographe : on trouve la liste de celles-ci en pages 226 et 227 du catalogue. Elles sont variées et vont d’un Portrait de Marie de Médicis par Antoine van Dyck (1631) à un Nu dans l’atelier de Raoul Dufy (1944). Présentant essentiellement des figures féminines, les œuvres choisies comportent aussi une nature morte florale et une vanité. Le seul personnage masculin convoqué est Narcisse, entouré lui aussi, par des fleurs. La figure féminine hante véritablement le travail sériel de Valérie Belin, à l’image de l’histoire de l’art.

The indigenous African languages of South Africa are not fully developed to provide for
specialised terminology and were considered unsuitable for use as languages of tuition and research. This was used as a scapegoat for not utilising these languages in the South African education system. Since 1994, however, terminology development has been one of the key priorities of democratic South Africa. The institutions of Higher Learning have been mandated to develop and intellectualise the indigenous languages for teaching, learning and research. In line with this, this article aims to
address the problem of unavailability of scientific or technical terms by illustrating how a multilingual corpus ––from which multilingual glossaries as resources for tuition and research can be compiled. Adopting a qualitative descriptive approach, suitable source texts in English and their translations in various African indigenous languages, namely, IsiZulu, IsiXhosa, IsiNdebele, SiSwati, Tshivenda, and Xitsonga were selected from the University study material for inclusion in the multilingual parallel corpus. ParaConc, a software that is suitable to query parallel texts, was used to align and extract terms from the corpus. The study demonstrates how parallel texts can be
useful in developing scientific and technical terms. The University of South Africa can become the centre of corpus compilation for the intellectualisation of the official indigenous South African languages, since it is the only university in the country that caters for all these languages.

This article provides introductory, step-by-step explanations of how to make a specialized corpus and an annotated frequency-based vocabulary list. One of my objectives is to help teachers, instructors, program administrators, and graduate students with little experience in this field be able to do so using free resources. Instructions are first given on how to create a specialized corpus. The steps involved in developing an annotated frequency-based vocabulary list focusing on the specific word usage in that corpus will then be explained. The examples are drawn from a project developed in an English for Academic Purposes Nursing Foundations Program at a university in the Middle East. Finally, a brief description of how these vocabulary lists were used in the classroom is given. It is hoped that the explanations provided will serve to open the door to the eld of corpus linguistics. Cet article présente des explications, étape par étape, visant la création d’un corpus spécialise...

The objective of this study was to investigate the influence of the popular Duolingo App on learning English in Thailand. Parts of the Duolingo English course for Thai speakers were used in a classroom-based intervention with two sections of English for Professional Purposes courses at a Thai university (n = 128). The students were split into two groups of users (n = 70) and non-users (n = 58), and a pre-test/post-test assessment of verb tense knowledge was conducted. The results showed that the Duolingo users had a significantly higher mean improvement in verb tense knowledge. Multiple regression showed that frequency of Duolingo use, perceived achievement, and perceived enjoyment positively influenced performance among the user group. Moderation analysis also showed that prior use of Duolingo partially moderated the relationships of level completion and achievement on score improvement. The implication is that Duolingo is a potentially useful supplement to classroom learning although its effects may change over time
as users become habituated.

English-medium instruction (EMI) is a growing trend in Japan, and one common challenge of EMI implementation is providing adequate language-proficiency preparation for students, including the development of general and academic vocabulary. This study used a corpus of approximately 500,000 words taken from reading texts used in EMI courses at one university in order to evaluate the New General Service List (NGSL) and the New Academic Word List (NAWL) as study tools for students in this university’s program. Results showed that the NGSL provided 87.7% coverage of the corpus, a marked improvement over the original General Service List, which provided only 79.7% coverage. The NAWL performed less well, providing only an additional 3.0% coverage beyond that of the NGSL alone. Also, a full 17.4% of NAWL words did not appear in the corpus. This finding calls into question the value of the NAWL as a study tool for this program. 日本における英語による専門教育（EMI）は、増加傾向にある。EMIを実施する上で大学が取り組むべきことの一つは、学生の語学力強化...

A thematic, bilingual glossary was used in an International English Language Testing System (IELTS) course at Politecnico di Torino, Italy. This paper reports on an evaluation performed on this glossary with the objective of determining its validity as a learning tool, as well as its usefulness in helping students pass IELTS at the required band mark. An overview of the literature on the subject of word lists, list-learning and bilingual pair vocabulary learning, together with a critical discussion of the glossary allows positive conclusions to be reached regarding the glossary’s validity. However, the difficulty of ascertaining any tangible influence of the glossary in students’ exam results reveals that the second objective of the evaluation may have been too ambitious. This paper pleads in favor of decontextualized vocabulary learning and the use of bilingual word pairs in SLA theory and English language teaching. Resumen En un curso de preparacion para el examen International En...

In this paper, we present a scientific corpus of abstracts of academic papers in English-Leicester Scientific Corpus (LSC). The LSC contains 1,673,824 abstracts of research articles and proceeding papers indexed by Web of Science (WoS) in which publication year is 2014. Each abstract is assigned to at least one of 252 subject categories. Paper metadata include these categories and the number of citations. We then develop scientific dictionaries named Leicester Scientific Dictionary (LScD) and Leicester Scientific Dictionary-Core (LScDC), where words are extracted from the LSC. The LScD is a list of 974,238 unique words (lemmas). The LScDC is a core list (sub-list) of the LScD with 104,223 lemmas. It was created by removing LScD words appearing in not greater than 10 texts in the LSC. LScD and LScDC are available online. Both the corpus and dictionaries are developed to be later used for quantification of meaning in academic texts. Finally, the core list LScDC was analysed by comparing its words and word frequencies with a classic academic word list 'New Academic Word List (NAWL)' containing 963 word families, which is also sampled from an academic corpus. The major sources of the corpus where NAWL is extracted are Cambridge English Corpus (CEC), oral sources and textbooks. We investigate whether two dictionaries are similar in terms of common words and ranking of words. Our comparison leads us to main conclusion: most of words of NAWL (99.6%) are present in the LScDC but two lists differ in word ranking. This difference is measured.

The selection of an appropriate word counting unit (WCU) for the purpose of second/foreign language vocabulary acquisition (SLVA) in the last decade has become a very important and relevant topic in academic circles. However, few studies address on-the-ground teaching practices and perspectives. This mixed-approach study, conducted through an online questionnaire, collected both quantitative and qualitative data from 30 ESL/EFL teachers in Japan. The questionnaire surveyed their vocabulary teaching experience and views regarding five categories of WCUs: all word tokens (i.e., All Forms and Meanings (AFM)), plemma, lemma, flemma, and Word Family (WF). The online survey revealed that most participants (i.e., those who were not aware of SLVA research and recent teaching practices) had limited experience and knowledge regarding WCUs and their impact. Another important finding is that although the WCU category participants were most experienced with is the WF (i.e., root/basic word lists), the WCU they have the highest pedagogical regard for is the lemma which considers parts of speech (POS) in vocabulary instruction and learning, followed closely by the plemma which additionally considers the various meanings words can take on, and also irregular inflectional patterns (e.g., irregular verb past tenses and past participles), and to a lesser extent the flemma which does not consider POS nor the various meanings and irregular inflectional patterns of words in vocabulary instruction.

University students are mainly advised to master the words in West's General Service List (GSL) and Coxhead's Academic Word List (AWL) in order to be able to read their academic texts easily and effectively. However, there are too many words in the two lists and a large number of them seem to be of less frequency in many academic disciplines; moreover, there are many important general and academic words which are missing in the two lists. The present study explored a corpus of psychology texts containing 3.4 million running words to work out the most frequent words used in psychology, a less investigated discipline. The corpus was analyzed by some text analysis software (TextStat and TextAnalys) and a list of 1587 most frequent word families was developed for psychology. The list included general English and academic words and no technical words of psychology. The frequency of GSL and AWL word families was investigated in the corpus to find out the GSL and AWL words highly frequent in psychology texts and also other high frequency words of psychology which are absent in the two lists. The results revealed that 1077 GSL and 95 AWL word families were of low frequency in psychology texts and there were 189 high frequency general and academic words which are absent in the GSL and AWL. The coverage of the developed psychology word list over the corpus was shown to be 2.2% higher than that of GSL plus AWL, although it contained 983 fewer words.

By comparing the vocabularies included in the Japan Association of College English Teachers (JACET) wordlists (1993, 2003, and 2016 editions) and recently released New General Service Lists (Brezina & Gablasova, 2013; Browne, 2013), we tried to identify the construct of "the vocabulary for Japanese learners" with which JACET researchers have been concerned. Our quantitative analysis has shown that it includes the vocabulary concerning (a) family and people, (b) houses and daily life, (c) foods and cooking, (d) clothes and fashions, (e) sports, (f) social meetings, (g) transportation, and (h) emotions and mental states, as well as (i) spoken English vocabulary and (j) non-basic forms. This finding will shed new light on the discussion of what kind of vocabulary should be included in pedagogical wordlists.

A thematic, bilingual glossary was used in an International English Language Testing System (IELTS) course at Politecnico di Torino, Italy. This paper reports on an evaluation performed on this glossary with the objective of determining its validity as a learning tool, as well as its usefulness in helping students pass IELTS at the required band mark. An overview of the literature on the subject of word lists, list-learning and bilingual pair vocabulary learning, together with a critical discussion of the glossary allows positive conclusions to be reached regarding the glossary’s validity. However, the difficulty of ascertaining any tangible influence of the glossary in students’ exam results reveals that the second objective of the evaluation may have been too ambitious. This paper pleads in favor of decontextualized vocabulary learning and the use of bilingual word pairs in SLA theory and English language teaching. Resumen En un curso de preparacion para el examen International En...

This paper presents the methodology and data used for the automatic extraction of the Romanian Academic Word List (Ro-AWL). Academic Word Lists are useful in both L2 and L1 teaching contexts. For the Romanian language, no such resource exists so far. Ro-AWL has been generated by combining methods from corpus and computational linguistics with L2 academic writing approaches. We use two types of data: (a) existing data, such as the Romanian Frequency List based on the ROMBAC corpus, and (b) self-compiled data, such as the expert academic writing corpus EXPRES. For constructing the academic word list, we follow the methodology for building the Academic Vocabulary List for the English language. The distribution of Ro-AWL features (general distribution, POS distribution) into four disciplinary datasets is in line with previous research. Ro-AWL is freely available and can be used for teaching, research and NLP applications.

Recent research favors specific academic wordlists over a general academic wordlist for preparing university students to read and publish academic papers in English. Although researchers have developed wordlists for various disciplines, some academic fields do not enjoy a well-developed technical wordlist. The present study aimed at developing and evaluating a specific academic wordlist for political sciences. A 3.5-million-word corpus of political sciences papers created and analyzed in order to develop the Politics Academic Word List (PAWL). The list included 2000 word families which were selected across and beyond the BNC/COCA wordlist based on frequency and range criteria. The word families enjoying an aggregate frequency of a hundred or more in the corpus and a minimum frequency of 10 in at least four of the seven sub-corpora were incorporated into the wordlist. The PAWL accounted for over 88% of the running words in the Politics Academic Corpus (PAC) and outperformed the list of General Service List (GSL) plus Academic Word List (AWL) words in coverage by 3 percent, despite containing 556 fewer word families. The study corroborates the value of a subject specific wordlist as a more fruitful source for academic vocabulary learning. Pedagogical implications and suggestions for further research are discussed.

Word lists have been recognized as a valuable pedagogical resource that can be used by language teachers and learners, materials developers and syllabus designers to identify vocabulary that needs attention. The increase in the accessibility of electronic corpora and the recent advances in corpus software tools has led to a proliferation of various types of corpus-based word lists informed by frequency counts, in some cases combined with other measures. However, there is a lack of research into how word lists are used in real pedagogical contexts. This exploratory study explores current practices and views related to the exploitation, construction, and evaluation of corpus-based word lists for English language teaching and learning purposes. The survey results indicate that word lists are used for a variety of purposes and in different settings, and that the context and goals for use of the word list should determine the nature of the list. Furthermore, while word lists are thought to be useful, several factors need to be considered to ensure successful implementation of lists into pedagogical contexts. Finally, the survey captured misuses and misconceptions of word lists that practitioners need to be aware of.

Second language vocabulary research makes much use of word frequency lists and their division into bands. In recent years, bands of 1,000 items have become conventional. However, there does not seem to be any firm basis or rationale for this. Conventional banding may be questioned since the utility of words varies greatly depending on frequency, because there are enormous differences in frequency within higher bands, and because the reliability of the placement of words in bands becomes progressively poorer at lower frequency levels. This article suggests an alternative approach: basing bands on coverage levels. Because of the frequency distribution of words, this means the highest frequency bands would contain very few words, while lower frequency bands would contain a great many words. The article shows how such bands can be constructed and presents a re-analysis of the results of a vocabulary test designed with conventional bands in terms of coverage-based bands. This re-analysis...

The choice of lexical unit has important consequences for L2 vocabulary research, testing and instruction. In recent years, the most widely used lexical unit has been the word family. This study examines the characteristics of word lists based on the word family and explores the levels of text coverage such lists may provide should the assumption that learners can deal with word families be incorrect. This is pursued through the detailed examination of a set of word-family-based word lists. The study finds that such word lists pose a number of challenges, including the number of word forms with multiple affixes, the number of word forms with more challenging affixes, and the number of word families in which the base word is not the most frequently occurring member. Moreover, the first thousand word families in particular are shown to be challenging. The study then demonstrates that if learners are unable to deal with the complexity of word families, even to a relatively small degree...

Creating a word list for the beverage services is one method to assist learners in this field to expand their English language vocabulary. The purpose of the current study was to create the Beverage Service Word List (BSWL). Data were collected from www.tasteatlas.com—a website that contains abundant beverage information from all over the world. The Beverage Service Corpus (BSC) was compiled from 1,729 beverage menus with a size of 471,233 tokens. The criteria used in the current study were frequency, range, lexical profiling, and expert consultation. The words included in the BSWL were those which occurred at least 13 times in 30 per cent of menus, were outside the reference word lists (the General Service List, the Academic Word List, the Function Word List, the abbreviation list, and the Proper Name List), and were scaled as 3 or 4 by two or more experts. As a result, the BSWL comprised 288 words with 7.92 per cent coverage of the BSC.

The study explores the usefulness of the word family as the unit of counting in studies of lexical coverage and comprehension. It determines the proportion of texts covered by the various members of a word family, that is, basewords, inflected words, and derived words, and analyzes the contribution of the affixed words to lexical thresholds. This exploration was performed by a text analysis computer program called Morpholex that analyzes the entire lexis of an entered text, pulling out all words bearing prefixes and suffixes and counting the unaffixed words as basewords. We analyzed a variety of texts, academic and narrative, authentic and simplified, and calculated the number and percentage of basewords and affixes in each text. We also located the most frequent affixes in our text corpus and demonstrated which affixes and how many contributed to 95 per cent and 98 per cent text coverages. Our results show that reaching the lexical thresholds for reading does not require the knowledge of most of the derived words in a word family since a small number of frequent affixes will provide the necessary coverage together with the basewords and inflections.

In Malaysia, research on the essential vocabulary for academic comprehension among preuniversity and university ESL students is rather limited. This study introduces the "Comprehension Corpus" to pinpoint critical words vital for reading understanding. This study aims to develop the Malaysian University English Test (MUET) Reading Corpus, in order to identify the vital vocabulary for text comprehension and the specific categories or word lists that improve reading based on their texts coverage in the text. In addition, the vocabulary size needed to comprehend the comprehension texts was identified. By analysing CEFR-aligned texts using tools like RANGE BNC-COCA and WordSmith, it was found that to comprehend 98% of the content, students needed familiarity with 8,000-word families. this extensive demand, a streamlined list of 100 words, grouped by frequent topics and enhanced with the New General Service List (NGSL) and New Academic Word List (NAWL), was developed. The research underscores the necessity for educators to adopt targeted vocabulary teaching methods, highlighting the interplay between vocabulary breadth and reading comprehension. This tailored approach aids teachers in addressing students' specific lexical needs, ensuring more effective academic reading outcomes.

This report describes a sociolinguistic and extensibility survey conducted from 2016–2018 among the Yawo people of Mozambique. The Yawo are a primarily homogeneous people group living predominantly in southern Malawi, northwestern Mozambique, and southern Tanzania. The initial phase of the survey began in 2016 and involved determining the locations of Yawo communities in Niassa Province before commencing the survey proper in 2017. Ciyawo is the name of the language that Yawo people speak. (ISO code [yao]).

The survey’s primary purpose was to determine whether Ciyawo written materials developed in Malawi would be adequate for use in Mozambique. The survey was conducted utilising three instruments: wordlist elicitation with both phonological and lexicostatistical analyses, recorded text testing (retelling method) of new Malawian Ciyawo Bible narratives, and sociolinguistic questionnaires in the form of interviews in the Ciyawo language.

During the research, it was discovered that Ciyawo in Mozambique is distinct from that spoken in Malawi (and Tanzania) in terms of phonological and lexical differences. It was also found that Mozambicans generally do not understand Malawian Ciyawo adequately enough to use Malawian literary materials, including the Bible. Although there is general mutual intelligibility, the survey results indicated the presence of Ciyawo variants between countries and regions. Furthermore, the results of the questionnaires show that Mozambicans desire the development of specifically Mozambican Ciyawo literature. This is especially emphasised in the common idea that the Yawo people originate from Mozambique, and so it is important that Mozambican Ciyawo is appropriately represented.

Although the primary purpose of this survey relates to whether Malawian Ciyawo literary materials are suitable for Mozambicans, the results of the wordlists, recorded text tests, and sociolinguistic questionnaires are helpful to anyone wishing to understand the sociolinguistic situation of Ciyawo in Mozambique. This includes government departments and non-governmental organisations looking to develop curricula or development programs among Yawo communities (particularly in Mozambique).
https://www.sil.org/resources/publications/entry/97250

This article describes a suite of free software programs for cell phones and PCs that have been created to efficiently develop ESL and EFL learner's knowledge of high frequency vocabulary. Until now, this level of efficiency has not been possible due to the variable nature of vocabulary knowledge within a class of students and the lack of diagnostic tools for identifying individual students' known and unknown vocabulary. The programs are capable of accurately and efficiently assessing the learner's English lexical size, identifying which specific high frequency words still need to be taught, and then teaching these important words via a time-intervalled flashcard system and learning games focused on developing automaticity of word knowledge. Although there have been several tests available for making estimates of a learner's vocabulary profile such as Nation's Vocabulary Levels Test (1990) and Meara's Yes/No test (1992), there has been no attempts to identify the specific words a learner knows. Through the application of Item Response Theory to test item responses, we have been able to assign perceived word difficulties to a list of the most common words in English. A computer adaptive test drawing from an item bank of these words quickly and accurately assesses the number of English words known by learners, as well as determines which specific words are known and unknown.

This corpus-based vocabulary study aimed to develop a new computer science academic word list across ten sub-disciplines of computer science defined by Association for Computing Machinery (hereafter ACM). A corpus of Computer Science containing 2,500,990 running words was developed from 300 Computer Science Research Articles (hereafter CSRAC) as a database of this study. Drawing on and combining procedures and methods from Coxhead (2000), Gardner and Davies (2014) and other previous studies, this study developed a New Computer Science Academic Word List (hereafter NCSAWL), containing the most frequently-used computer words in computer research articles from the corpus. The NCSAWL contains 444 words, which accounts for approximately 20.33% of the coverage in the CSRAC, the NCSAWL has a much better coverage of computer English. The result of this study has numerous implications for computer science learners, English teachers, researchers, as well as material writers and course syllabu...

Engineering students are required to read Engineering textbooks which are specialized in nature, containing significant amount of Engineering vocabulary and terminology. There is a language need for better comprehension of Engineering concepts and this can be done by focusing on the frequent and essential Engineering vocabulary required. In addition, since most English Language Teaching (ELT) teachers are non-specialists in the field of Engineering, they can be unguided when it comes to the teaching of required Engineering vocabulary in a classroom. Furthermore, the core problem concerning the Malaysian textbooks is that the textbooks produced are not based on any essential word lists or corpora in the syllabus. Thus, evaluating and analyzing the specialised textbooks is a substantial way to highlight the importance of lexical components for the Engineering students to initiate them into their discourse community and for ELT teachers who teach English for Specific Purposes (ESP) cou...

Kanazawa, Y., & Lafleur, L. (2023). ENAWL: Enriching the New Academic Word List with Emotional Valence, Familiarity, and Knowledgeability. Kokusaigaku Kenkyu - Journal of International Studies, 12(1), 141-151. http://hdl.handle.net/10236/00030725

Abstract: There is a need for academic word items suitable for tertiary education to be supplemented with wider data including ones of subjective nature. This research reports on the accumulated data from 222 Japanese university students who were enrolled over a period of 24 weeks to assess the subjective lexical attributes, i.e., their familiarity (perceived encounter frequency of word items), emotional valence (perceived positive/neutral/negative value of word items), and knowledgeability (yes/no receptive knowledge test) of the New Academic Word List (NAWL)’s 963-word items. Familiarity correlated very highly with knowledgeability, which presents a strong argument as to how both concepts are closely related. Extremity of valence (i.e., the higher the score, the more positive or negative the stimulus is) correlated considerably with familiarity and also with knowledgeability. These results present a good argument for measurable emotional valence being a positive influence for word familiarization and knowledgeability. The previously published NAWL frequency data and this study’s data permitted a hybrid resequencing of the word items based on both objective and subjective concepts. Furthermore, the authors supplemented the NAWL with subjective lexical attribute data collected by the study. These public domain modifications were implemented to permit more in-depth studies and pedagogical applications in the future.

要旨：高等教育に適した学術英単語は、主観的指標を含む広範なデータで補完されることが望ましい。 本研究では、日本の大学生222 名を対象に24 週間にわたって実施した調査の蓄積データを報告する。参加者は、New Academic Word List（NAWL）963 語について、主観的語彙属性である親密度、情動価、知識度を評価した。結果、親密度と知識度は高い正の相関を示し、両者の密接な関係が示唆された。また、情動価極度は、親密度とも知識度とも正の相関を示した。これらの結果は、情動価が単語の親密度と知識度にプラスの影響を与えている可能性を示している。既存のNAWL 頻度データと本研究のデータにより、客観的概念と主観的概念の両方に基づくハイブリッドな単語項目の再順序付けが可能となった。さらに、著者らはNAWL に主観的な語彙属性データを付加した。これらの拡張は、将来の詳細な研究や教育的な応用に役立てられるために電子上で公開されている。

This corpus-based vocabulary study aimed to develop a new computer science academic word list across ten sub-disciplines of computer science defined by Association for Computing Machinery (hereafter ACM). A corpus of Computer Science containing 2,500,990 running words was developed from 300 Computer Science Research Articles (hereafter CSRAC) as a database of this study. Drawing on and combining procedures and methods from Coxhead (2000), Gardner and Davies (2014) and other previous studies, this study developed a New Computer Science Academic Word List (hereafter NCSAWL), containing the most frequently-used computer words in computer research articles from the corpus. The NCSAWL contains 444 words, which accounts for approximately 20.33% of the coverage in the CSRAC, the NCSAWL has a much better coverage of computer English. The result of this study has numerous implications for computer science learners, English teachers, researchers, as well as material writers and course syllabu...

Japanese graduate school students in the field of science and engineering need to read academic research in their second language (L2), and such tasks can be challenging. Studies showed a strong (0.78) correlation between vocabulary size and reading comprehension (McLean et al., 2020), and providing high-frequency word lists could enhance comprehension. In this work-in-progress, 1.35 million tokens of professor-recommended reading materials were used to investigate a method to create a vocabulary list that would benefit science majors in graduate school; the procedures to create a corpus and a high-frequency word list efficiently; and the steps required to create a cleaner corpus. This paper outlines a systematic literature-informed method that includes input from professors in the field; the combined use of tailored script in MATLAB and AntCont (Anthony, 2022) generated corpus and high-frequency words efficiently; and repeated comparison of original PDFs and the matching text files, then adding MATLAB script to deal with specific issues created by a cleaner text. This proposed method can be applied in other contexts to enhance the generation of high-frequency word lists.

This study explored the extent of use of Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) by teachers of academic English. The attitudes and beliefs which inform teacher use were also investigated. The research comprised a self-administered online survey which gathered 193 responses from practitioners, supplemented by a small number of follow-up interviews. The survey found that the AWL is widely-used by teachers of academic English, both as a guide for course and materials design and as an instrument recommended for self-study use. English teachers adopt and adapt the list for use with their learners because they believe that it provides a principled basis to focus on general purposes academic vocabulary which is relevant to many learners. The survey confirms that the influence of the AWL as an inspiration for the creation of subject-specific lists is matched by a similar level of popularity amongst practitioners. However, teachers also expressed a number of important criticism s and misg...

The article can be downloaded at https://so06.tci-thaijo.org/index.php/thoughts/article/view/258474. A lack of knowledge of the political terminology used in news writing makes it difficult for L2 learners of English in the field of political science to keep themselves abreast of current worldwide political situations. This study built a semi-specialised word list for political science students interested in international political news. The Political News Corpus (PNC) was compiled between January 1, 2019 and June 30, 2021 from 6 news agencies: CNN, Politico, BBC, The Sun, ABC News, and 9News. The PNC contained 4,814 news items with a total size of 3,837,958 running words. Five criteria based on Laosrirattanachai and Ruangjaroon’s (2021) Filters (lexical frequency, lexical range, lexical profiling, lexical keyness, and expert consultation) were used to build the Semi-Technical Political News Word List (S-TPNWL). The AntWordProfiler programme (Anthony, 2014) and the Key-BNC programme (Graham, n.d.) were used to extract candidate words. The findings showed that the S-TPNWL contained 172 word families and covered approximately 5.28 per cent of the PNC. Political science students interested in international political news could utilise the S-TPNWL to increase their vocabulary range and understanding when reading political news. Also, teachers can benefit from the S-TPNWL by using it as a reference for creating teaching materials.

In the 1950s, the linguist Morris Swadesh published a list of 200 words called the Swadesh list, allegedly the 200 lexical concepts found in all languages that were least likely to be borrowed from other languages. Swadesh later whittled his list down to 100 items. The Swadesh list, however, was based mainly on intuition, according to Martin Haspelmath and Uri Tadmor. Translations of the Swadesh list into a set of languages allow researchers to quantify the interrelatedness of those languages. The Swadesh list is named after the U.S. linguist Morris Swadesh. It is used in lexicostatistics (the quantitative assessment of the genealogical relatedness of languages) and glottochronology (the dating of language divergence). The Leipzig-Jakarta list is a 100-word word list used by linguists to test the degree of chronological separation of languages by comparing words that are resistant to borrowing. The Leipzig-Jakarta list became available in 2009. In 2016 we have undertaken a set of fieldtrips to the areas of traditional dwelling of the Tomsk Tatars funded by the SOAS ELDP project, aiming at gathering fieldtrip material including the Leipzig-Jakarta list. It's worth mentioning that the dialect of the Tomask Tatars has been undeservingly forgotten by linguists who take up Turkic varieties of Siberia. The last profound study of Eushta dialect, which comprises the Tomsk Tatar dialect cluster along with the idioms spoken Takhtamyshevo and Chyornaya Rechka was carried out in the 1960 s. The results show that the dialect complex spoken by indigenous Turkic peoples who reside in the Tomsk area in the villages of Eushta, Chernaya Rechka, Takhtamyshevo, Boriki, Timiryazevo, Barabinka, Kaftanchikovo and some others, as well as the city of Tomsk, though retaining basic linguistic features of the North Kyptchak languages and very close to Kazan Tatar literary language, manifest a set of unique lexical data, which differ even within the Tomsk Tatar dialect cluster, e.g. the word-egg‖ has 3 different variants: jymyrqa (literary Kazan), kukaj and tygam which are regional and have no direct parallels in the adjacent Siberian Turkic cognates, which gives a broad field for subsequent comparative study.

This paper investigates the use of Academic Vocabulary List (D. Gardner & Davies, 2014) items in successful university study writing. Overall, levels of use of AVL items are high, and increase as students progress through the years of undergraduate and taught postgraduate study, suggesting that it may be a useful resource. However, significant variation is found across text types and disciplines. While the former is relatively minor, the latter is extensive, suggesting the list is more relevant to some student writers than others. An analysis by items indicates that around half of the words on the list are used very little. Moreover, the items which are frequent differ across disciplines. However, a small core of 427 items was found to be frequent across 90% of disciplines. This suggests that a generic productive academic vocabulary does exist, but that it is smaller in scope than the full Academic Vocabulary List.

University students are mainly advised to master the words in West’s General Service List (GSL) and Coxhead’s Academic Word List (AWL) in order to be able to read their academic texts easily and effectively. However, there are too many words in the two lists and a large number of them seem to be of less frequency in many academic disciplines; moreover, there are many important general and academic words which are missing in the two lists. The present study explored a corpus of psychology texts containing 3.4 million running words to work out the most frequent words used in psychology, a less investigated discipline. The corpus was analyzed by some text analysis software (TextStat and TextAnalys) and a list of 1587 most frequent word families was developed for psychology. The list included general English and academic words and no technical words of psychology. The frequency of GSL and AWL word families was investigated in the corpus to find out the GSL and AWL words highly frequent ...

This study created the Scientific Research Article Word List (SRAWL) out of the titles and abstracts of scientific research articles. The purpose of the list is to show scientists who are not native speakers of English what words they need to learn in order to handle scientific research articles in English. When scientists are determining whether or not a research article is worth reading, they look at the title first and then the abstract. Therefore, it is helpful if they learn words that are frequently used in these two parts. In order to make a list of such words, the titles and abstracts of 12,968 research articles and reports, published in Science between 2000 and 2016, were collected to create a corpus of 1.7 million words. Lexical coverage and word frequency were then investigated. The most frequent 7,850 lemmas appeared 13 times or more in the corpus and accounted for 94.75% of the total tokens. By excluding proper nouns, marginal words, and abbreviations from them, a list of 6,947 lemmas was created. The list was divided into four sublists according to the degrees of importance so that users will know which groups of words are more important than others. Scientists need to read scientific research articles in English in order to keep up with the latest developments in their fields, even if their first language is not English, as the vast majority of such articles are published in English. At the same time, scientists are busy people, and so they have to be selective in choosing which articles to read. When they are deciding whether or not to read an article, they look at the title first. If they find it interesting and relevant to their needs,

University Admission Tests in Thailand are important documents which reflect Thailand's education system. To study at a higher education level, all students generally need to take the University Admission Tests designed by the National Institute of Educational Testing Service (NIETS). For the English test, vocabulary and reading comprehension is one of the key elements. In order to prepare for and pass the test, students should learn and accumulate an adequate amount of vocabulary. The purpose of this research is to conduct a documentary study on the scattering and lexical profiles of Thailand University Admission Tests. Fifteen papers covering 55,161 running words were analyzed in a framework of two word lists: General Service List (GSL) and Academic Word List (AWL). The results showed that the coverage of GSL and AWL are 85.05% and 4.58%, respectively. A combination of the GSL and the

The popularity of using textbooks in second language programs in universities around the world continues to grow. Textbooks support teachers in their teaching by providing accessible materials and clear instruction. In addition, learners are guided by familiar lesson frameworks (e.g., beginning, middle, end) to guide their independent study (Swales, 1980). However, textbooks present many challenges. Learners’ difficulties include the range in lexical knowledge they must possess (Nation, 2006) and the different lexical and grammatical features that are found in written textbook registers (Biber et al., 1998). This study investigates and outlines the vocabulary load of two English for Academic Purpose textbooks, using the British National Corpus and Corpus of Contemporary American English (BNC/COCA) 25,000 (Nation, 2012) and JACET8000 (JACET, 2016) word lists. The results show that for each textbook, more lexical demands are needed for second language learners in the JACET8000 compare...