ENG 626 CORPUS APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE STUDIES FL, AWL Bambang Kaswanti Purwo

ENG 626CORPUS APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE STUDIES

FL, AWL

Bambang Kaswanti [email protected]

Word Levels a 10-year-old native speaker of English has a vocabulary ofaround 10,000 word families

A word family describes the base form of a word plus its closely related inflected and derived forms. For example, here's the word family for absent:

absent absented absenting absents absentee absentees absenteeism absently

http://www.ed2go.com/elt_demo/3tv_demo/L02.htm

rough estimate: the vocabulary size of native speakers by adding 1,000 word families for each year of their life up to the age of about 20 a native speaker of English (a university graduate) probably knows at least 20,000 words

http://www.ed2go.com/elt_demo/3tv_demo/L02.htm

goals for a learner of English as a second language[20,000 words – very ambitious]split up the vocabulary they need to learn into four levels: high-frequency, low-frequency, academic, and technical

Word Frequencyfrequency of a word: how often it occurs in a textword most frequently used in written English: the a frequency of around seven in every 100 words of text = the occurs in almost every line of a written text

http://www.ed2go.com/elt_demo/3tv_demo/L02.htm

[when Paul Nation started studying vocabulary teaching]to see how often each word occurredcounted a 1,000-word text word-by-word • manually: a whole weekend • now with computers: less than a second

Word Frequency Word Frequency

the 100 wide 1

of 74 will 1

to 58 without 1

and 56 work 1

words 46 working 1

a 41 write 1

in 39 yet 1

vocabulary 38 you 1

is 30 young 1

are 25 yourself 1

http://www.ed2go.com/elt_demo/3tv_demo/L02.htm

[original text: 1,906 words long, 532 different word types]

• “running words” or “tokens”: all the words in a text, including repeated words• 11 running words, a and of occur twice

http://www.ed2go.com/elt_demo/3tv_demo/L02.htm

High- and Low-Frequency Words• a relatively small group of words (around 2,000) much more frequently used than other words in the lang• the 2,000 high-frequency words include the function words

and content words.

Function words: articles (a, the), conjunctions (because, but, although, and), prepositions (in, below, above), determiners (each, every, this, those), numbersContent words: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs

A small number of words cover a lot of the text.

General Service List of English Words (GSL) by Michael West • 2,000 word families • lots of useful information about frequency and meanings • it's been proven to work in graded readers.

http://www.ed2go.com/elt_demo/3tv_demo/L02.htm

graded readers: books specially written in a limited vocabulary easy to read for learners of English (e.g. some books may have 300 words or less)

• the rest of vocabulary is made up of low-frequency words • most conservative estimate: 120,000 low-frequency English words (not including proper names)

• low-frequency words always a problem for lang. Ls n Ts (unpredictable when they'll occur in a text) • Ts need to deal with low- n high-frequency words differently

Academic and Technical Words• academic vocabulary: additional high-frequency word list known as the Academic Word List (AWL)• to be learned after students acquire the 2,000 high-frequency words

http://www.ed2go.com/elt_demo/3tv_demo/L02.htm

• AWL (developed by Averil Coxhead): 570 word families (not in the most frequent 2,000 words); for anyone doing academic study in almost any subject area

• technical vocabulary of particular subject areas e.g., in computing: mouse, pixel, rom, and retrieve

Vocabulary Level Number of Words Text Coverage

high-frequency 2,000 70%

academic 570 5%

technical 1,000 20%

low-frequency 6,000 5%

http://www.ed2go.com/elt_demo/3tv_demo/L02.htm

Academic Word List (AWL) – Averil Coxhead (1998) An Academic Word List. English Language Institute Occasional Publication No. 18.

• developed at the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, NZ• a list of 570 words, excluding words in the most frequent 2000 words of English• to be used for Ls at tertiary level study

• the headwords = the stem form of the words• the headwords of the AWL are listed on pp. 7–11 • the word families of the AWL are listed in sublists 1–10• the word family analyse, for example, include the regular inflections of the verb: analysed, analysing, analyses the derivations of the word: analysis, analyst, analysts, analytical, analytically, etc. the American spelling: analyze, analyzed, analyzes, analyzing• the most frequently used member of the family is in italics e.g. analysis the most common form the word family analyse

• the word families of the AWL selected from the words in the Academic Corpus (AC), approx. 3,500,000 words• the AC is a written corpus of academic English: journal articles, book chapters, course workbooks, laboratory manuals, and course notes• four faculty sections: ▪ Arts ▪ Commerce ▪ Law ▪ Science• each faculty section approx. 875,000 running words• each faculty section divided into seven subject areas, approx. 125,000 running words