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A NEW ACADEMIC WORDLIST

A NEW ACADEMIC WORDLIST. A veril C oxhead Hüsem Korkmaz MA TEFL. The General Service List (GSL). was developed from a corpus of 5 million words with the needs of ESL/EFL learners in mind, contains the most widely useful 2,000 word families in English. The

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A NEW ACADEMIC WORDLIST

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  1. A NEW ACADEMIC WORDLIST Averil Coxhead Hüsem Korkmaz MA TEFL

  2. The General Service List (GSL) • wasdeveloped from acorpus of 5 million words with the needs of ESL/EFL learners in mind, • contains the most widely useful 2,000 word families in English. The GSL has been criticised for its size (Engels, 1968), age (Richards, 1974),and need for revision (Hwang, 1989). Despite these criticisms, the GSLcovers up to

  3. A variety of word lists havebeen compiled either by hand or by computer to identify the most usefulwords in an academic vocabulary. • Campion and Elley (1971) • Praninskas (1972) Corporaandidentifiedwordsthatoccuredacross a range of texts • Lynn (1973) • Ghadessy(1979) Studentannotatitonsabovewords in textbooks • Xue and Nation (1984) University Word List(UWL) Combination of thefourlistsmentioned

  4. University Word List (UWL) TheUWL has been widely used by learners, teachers, course designers, andresearchers. However, as an amalgam of the four different studies, itlacked consistent selection principles and had many of the weaknesses ofthe prior work. The corpora on which the studies were based were smalland did not contain a wide and balanced range of topics.

  5. An academic word listshould play a crucial role in,

  6. However, • there is a need for a newacademic word list based on data gathered from a large, well-designedcorpus of academic English. • The ideal word list would be divided intosmaller, frequency-based sublists to aid in the sequencing of teachingand in materials development. • A word list based on the occurrence ofword families in a corpus of texts representing a variety of academicregisters can provide information about how words are actually used

  7. Whattokeep in mindwhiledevelopingACADEMIC CORPORAandWORD LISTS?

  8. Thedevelopment of AcademicCorporaand Word Lists REPRESENTATION ORGANIZATION SIZE WORD SELECTION

  9. RESEARCH QUESTIONS

  10. Questionsframing the description of the AWL: • Which lexical items occur frequently and uniformlyacross a widerange of academic material but are not among the first 2,000 wordsof English as given in the GSL (West, 1953)? • Do the lexical items occur with different frequencies in arts, commerce,law, and science texts?

  11. The evaluation of the AWL • What percentage of the words in the Academic Corpus does the AWLcover? • Do the lexical items identified occur frequently in an independentcollection of academic texts? • How frequently do the words in the AWL occur in nonacademictexts? • How does the AWL compare with the UWL (Xue & Nation, 1984)?

  12. METHODOLOGY

  13. Evaluation of AWL To evaluate the AWL, its coverage of these is discussed and compared with the UWL: • (a) the Academic Corpus along with the GSL (West, 1953) • (b) a second collection of academic texts • (c) a collection of fiction texts

  14. Developing the Academic Corpus

  15. Developing the Academic Corpus

  16. Composition of theAcademicCorpus

  17. Developing the Academic Word List Selection criteria for words:

  18. RESULTS&EVALUATION

  19. Questionsframing the description of the AWL: • Which lexical items occur frequently and uniformlyacross a widerange of academic material but are not among the first 2,000 wordsof English as given in the GSL (West, 1953)? 570 word families

  20. Questionsframing the description of the AWL: • Do the lexical items occur with different frequencies in arts, commerce,law, and science texts?

  21. Occurrence of Academic Words

  22. The evaluation of the AWL • What percentage of the words in the Academic Corpus does the AWLcover? The AWL accountsfor 10.0 of thetokens in theAcademicCorpus GSL (2000 words) + AWL = 86 % of theAcademicCorpus

  23. The evaluation of the AWL • Do the lexical items identified occur frequently in an independentcollection of academic texts? A secondcorpuswasmadeup of textsthat had met thecriteriaforinclusion in theAcademicCorpus but were not includedeitherbecausetheywerecollectedtoolateorbecausethesubjectareatheybelongedtowasalreadycompleter

  24. The evaluation of the AWL • How frequently do the words in the AWL occur in nonacademictexts? • TheAcademicWordlist – Project Gutenberg(50 texts) • AWL accountsfor1,4 % of thetokens in PG collection (lowerthanAWL’s10 %coverage of AcademicCorpus) • Hugedifferencesuggests AWL wordfamiliesaremostlyassociatedwithacademicwriting

  25. The evaluation of the AWL • How does the AWL compare with the UWL (Xue & Nation, 1984)? Thoughsmallerthan UWL, AWL gives a betterreturn on learning, as studentsneedtolearnonly 570 wordfamiliesinstead of 836 forthesamecoverage of academictexts.

  26. How does the AWL compare with the UWL (Xue & Nation, 1984)? AWL UWL 401 435 word families 51 % 135

  27. How does the AWL compare with the UWL (Xue & Nation, 1984)? • UWL includes 570 word families that do not occur in the Academic Corpus. So, even if the students learn these words, they might rarely or never meet them in academic texts. • AWL is smaller than UWL in size. However, it has a higher coverage of academic texts • AWL covers a wider range of subject areas

  28. ImplicationsforTeaching Set vocabularygoalsfor EAP courses Constructrelevantteachingmaterials Helpstudentsfocus on usefulvocabularyitems Directlyteachthewords in the AWL

  29. For detailed information: AWL: http://www.uefap.com/vocab/select/awl.htm Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.net

  30. Thanks for your participation and attention… Hüsem Korkmaz

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