Word Lists

This poster presentation explores the current extent of use of Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) by teachers of academic English, exposing the breadth of use to which it has been put. The interplay of attitudes and beliefs underpinning AWL use are also revealed, reflecting its broad appeal but also exposing some teachers’ concerns with regard to its use.

This article surveys various long-standing ambiguities and confusions that continue to dog lexicostatistics and glottochronology. I aim to offer some novel perspectives and clarifications, which also help map out how we might devise new, alternative methods to build upon the good in Swadesh's troubled legacy. I challenge the recent trend towards honing down Swadesh's original list to a minimal core. A richer signal on language relationships is to be had not by discarding the data in meanings considered 'unstable', but by exploring the revealing patterns that emerge only when those meanings are kept, and contrasted against their 'core' counterparts.

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, word-family-based lists may provide far lower text coverage levels than may be assumed. It concludes that in work on second language vocabulary, careful consideration is needed of the appropriacy of the word family as the lexical unit and highlights the range of work based on the word family that may need reevaluating.

―Original Vocabularies of Five West Caucasian Languages‖ and provides
information about the author and his work. The English headwords are
accompanied by their translations in the languages spoken in Georgia:
Georgian, Megrelian (―Mingrelian‖), Laz (―Lazian‖), Svan (―Swanetian‖),
and Abkhazian. With a number of positive aspects, Peacock‘s ―Vocabularies‖
should be considered a significant vestige in the history of English-Caucasian
lexicography which can yield much valuable information as a result of the
thorough investigation of individual entries and their translation equivalents in
the five Caucasian languages spoken in Georgia.

Word lists present an essential tool in vocabulary teaching. Compilation of specific word lists for various fields is one of the most prominent branches of research in this field at the moment. New methodological changes in word list formation have been proposed because of the appearance of the New-GSL (Brezina&Gablasova, 2013) and AVL (Gardner & Davies, 2013).The aim of this paper is twofold. The first one is to present a word list overview which would reflect how these changes have affected the field so far. The second is to serve as a methodological guide for future researchers interested in specific word list formation. The paper provides an overview of the two most significant word lists the GSL (West, 1953) and AWL (Coxhead, 2000) along with their proposed replacements, detailed information about seven specific word lists, which were published from 2013 to 2016, with a specific focus on corpus formation criteria, word selection criteria and validity and relevance testing.

ENGLISH TRANSLATION IN 'THE VIRGIN ISLANDS TEXTUAL HERITAGE' (Ph.D. thesis Van Rossem 2017)
Diplomatic edition of the Virgin Islands Dutch Creole wordlists which were made by Frank G. Nelson during his fieldwork on St. Thomas and St. Croix in 1936. Contains numerous remarks and notes by Hans den Besten. Published as digital article for Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde 2013.

Documento producido en enero del 2020 para la digitalización de mis notas de campo sobre la lengua movima (aislada), hablada en Santa Ana de Yacuma.
Los datos fueron extraídos de una grabación propia para la elicitación de palabras con el sonido implosivo apico-alveolar sonoro y alveolares el 25 de septiembre de 2018, en Santa Ana de Yacuma, Beni, Bolivia, Sudamérica. Se trabajó con la hablante de movima Cándida Chori Tereva.

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 field of corpus linguistics. Cet article présente des explications, étape par étape, visant la création d'un corpus spécialisé et d'un lexique annoté et basé sur la fréquence. Un de mes objectifs consiste à aider les enseignants, les administrateurs de programme et les étudiants aux études supérieures avec peu d'expérience dans ce domaine à réussir ce projet en utilisant des ressources gratuites. D'abord, des directives expliquent la création d'un corpus spécialisé. Ensuite, sont présentées les étapes du développement d'un lexique visant le corpus, annoté et basé sur la fréquence. Les exemples sont tirés d'un projet développé dans une université du Moyen-Orient pour un cours d'an-glais académique dans un programme de fondements de la pratique infirmière. En dernier lieu, je présente une courte description de l'emploi en classe de ces listes de vocabulaire. J'espère que ces explications ouvriront la porte au domaine de la linguistique de corpus.

Following a rapid increase in the capabilities and accessibility of neural machine translation (NMT) systems, a substantial number of students utilize online translators (OTs) for diverse language learning purposes. In language learning, OTs are frequently used to scaffold vocabulary learning. To select useful vocabulary words for learning, in this paper, we propose utilizing source and target text in NMT systems to generate personalized word lists. In the experiment, we implemented a word counting module in our NMT system and generated word lists based on source words from 50 English articles and target English words of 25 Korean articles with content related to Artificial Intelligence (AI) to show an example. Through the proposed method, we generated a highly specific word list that directly aligned with the interests of individual OT users and had low word overlap with other widely used academic word lists. With these personalized word lists, students can strategically identify and study useful words to effectively increase their specialized English vocabulary knowledge.

La pensée du cliché est indissociable d’un geste critique, qui en fait l’envers de l’originalité : ressassés, usés, signes de paresse intellectuelle, les clichés désignent dans la langue la puissance du commun. Au-delà d’une condamnation expéditive, qui génère elle-même ses propres clichés (des clichés il faut toujours se défaire), nous proposons ici d’analyser en détail les raisons de la critique, en prêtant une attention particulière aux apports de deux théoriciens du style, Antoine Albalat et Rémy de Gourmont. Ces deux auteurs ont participé à la condamnation du cliché de manière constructive, fournissant listes, éclairages linguistiques, mais aussi une « philosophie du cliché » (R. de Gourmont) qui met en regard les automatismes de la mémoire et la qualité particulière des images portées par les clichés. La confrontation de leurs analyses permet de renouveler la problématique du cliché et de penser l’efficacité et l’évolution particulière de ces images, que l’on présente d’ordinaire comme figées.


The thought of the cliché is inseparable from a critical gesture, which makes it the opposite of originality: outdated, worn out, signs of intellectual laziness, the clichés designate in the language the power of the common. Beyond an expeditious condemnation, which itself generates its own clichés (clichés must always be discarded), we propose here to analyze in detail the reasons for the criticism, paying particular attention to the contributions of two theorists of the style, Antoine Albalat and Rémy de Gourmont. These two authors participated in the condemnation of the cliché in a constructive way, providing lists, linguistic insights, but also a "philosophy of the cliché" (R. de Gourmont) that compares the automatisms of memory and the particular quality of the images carried by the clichés. The confrontation of their analyses renew the problem of the cliché and put light on the particular evolution of these images, which are usually presented as fixed.

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

Although borrowing and contact are recognised as important factors in language histories, there is no clear and agreed way of dealing with their effects on methods like traditional lexicostatistics. We argue that one promising approach involves subdividing standard meaning-lists into more and less conservative sublists. Differences between trees or networks generated from these sublists may then indicate borrowing. This approach has been tested on Indo-European, but here we apply it to languages of the Andes in an attempt to answer the vexed Quechumara question: are Quechua and Aymara genetically related, or linked only by contact? Our evidence suggests that contact is the more likely explanation for parallels between Quechua and Aymara.

The present study was an attempt to compare the effect of keyword and word list methods on immediate retention of English vocabulary in a natural classroom setting. Two intact classes from a junior high school in Astara, Iran were randomly assigned to one of the two learning conditions: keyword and word list. A meaning recall test was administered immediately at the end of the second session of the treatment. Results showed that the keyword method produced better recall compared to the word list method, suggesting a promising educational value for its utility.

See the full paper at https://www.culi.chula.ac.th/publicationsonline/files/article/dFtvWGjSUtTue42311.pdf When learning high- and mid-frequency words, approximately 5,000 words might be inadequate for
learners to survive in a career as a tourist guide. This paper aims to construct technical word lists for Thai
tourist guides to serve as supplementary learning materials. Different word lists need different criteria for
their construction. Three main methods are used to construct word lists: lexical profiling, eliminating off-list
words, and expert verification. The self-compiled corpus comprising 653,196 tokens gathered from www.tourismthailand.org is used to construct six subword lists including the technical word list for Thai tourist guides containing 391 words and the technical word lists for northern, central, eastern, northeastern, and southern Thai tourist guides composing of 245, 264, 138, 187, and 176 words, respectively. The authors suggest using the word lists after mastering 2,000 high-frequency words, 570 academic words, and 378 tourism business words to prepare learners for their future career paths.