Evaluating lists of high-frequency words: Teachers’ and learners’ perspectives

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Abstract

With a number of word lists available for teachers to choose from, teachers and students need to know which list provides the best return for learning? Four well-established lists were compared and it was found that BNC/COCA2000 (British National Corpus / Corpus of Contemporary American English 2000) and the New General Service List (New-GSL) provided the greatest lexical coverage in spoken and written corpora. The present study further compared these two lists using teacher perceptions of word usefulness and learner vocabulary knowledge as the criteria. First, 78 experienced teachers of English as a second language / English as a foreign language (ESL/EFL) rated the usefulness of 973 non-overlapping items between the two lists for their learners. Second, 135 Vietnamese EFL learners completed 15 yes/no tests which measured their knowledge of the same 973 words. Teachers perceived that the BNC/COCA2000 had more useful words. Items in this list were also better known by the learners. This suggests that the BNC/COCA2000 is the more useful high-frequency wordlist for second language (L2) learners.

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Moving beyond Kucera and Francis: a critical evaluation of current word frequency norms and the introduction of a new and improved word frequency measure for American English.

Marc Brysbaert, Boris New (2009)

Word frequency is the most important variable in research on word processing and memory. Yet, the main criterion for selecting word frequency norms has been the availability of the measure, rather than its quality. As a result, much research is still based on the old Kucera and Francis frequency norms. By using the lexical decision times of recently published megastudies, we show how bad this measure is and what must be done to improve it. In particular, we investigated the size of the corpus, the language register on which the corpus is based, and the definition of the frequency measure. We observed that corpus size is of practical importance for small sizes (depending on the frequency of the word), but not for sizes above 16-30 million words. As for the language register, we found that frequencies based on television and film subtitles are better than frequencies based on written sources, certainly for the monosyllabic and bisyllabic words used in psycholinguistic research. Finally, we found that lemma frequencies are not superior to word form frequencies in English and that a measure of contextual diversity is better than a measure based on raw frequency of occurrence. Part of the superiority of the latter is due to the words that are frequently used as names. Assembling a new frequency norm on the basis of these considerations turned out to predict word processing times much better than did the existing norms (including Kucera & Francis and Celex). The new SUBTL frequency norms from the SUBTLEX(US) corpus are freely available for research purposes from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental, as well as from the University of Ghent and Lexique Web sites.

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SUBTLEX-UK: a new and improved word frequency database for British English.

WALTER VAN HEUVEN, Paweł Mandera, Emmanuel Keuleers … (2014)

We present word frequencies based on subtitles of British television programmes. We show that the SUBTLEX-UK word frequencies explain more of the variance in the lexical decision times of the British Lexicon Project than the word frequencies based on the British National Corpus and the SUBTLEX-US frequencies. In addition to the word form frequencies, we also present measures of contextual diversity part-of-speech specific word frequencies, word frequencies in children programmes, and word bigram frequencies, giving researchers of British English access to the full range of norms recently made available for other languages. Finally, we introduce a new measure of word frequency, the Zipf scale, which we hope will stop the current misunderstandings of the word frequency effect.

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A New Academic Word List

Averil Coxhead (2001)

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Author and article information

Contributors

Thi Ngoc Yen Dang: (View ORCID Profile)

Averil Coxhead: (View ORCID Profile)

Journal

Title: Language Teaching Research

Abbreviated Title: Language Teaching Research

Publisher: SAGE Publications

ISSN (Print): 1362-1688

ISSN (Electronic): 1477-0954

Publication date (Electronic): April 03 2020

Page: 136216882091118

Affiliations

[1 ]University of Leeds, UK

[2 ]University of Western Ontario, Canada

[3 ]Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Article

DOI: 10.1177/1362168820911189

SO-VID: 4355d624-1b4f-41ba-9228-79ac47838fff

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http://journals.sagepub.com/page/policies/text-and-data-mining-license

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