Evaluating Lists of High-Frequency Words: Teachers' and Learners' Perspectives
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| Title: | Evaluating Lists of High-Frequency Words: Teachers' and Learners' Perspectives |
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| Language: | English |
| Authors: | Dang, Thi Ngoc Yen (ORCID |
| Source: | Language Teaching Research. Jul 2022 26(4):617-641. |
| Availability: | SAGE Publications. 2455 Teller Road, Thousand Oaks, CA 91320. Tel: 800-818-7243; Tel: 805-499-9774; Fax: 800-583-2665; e-mail: journals@sagepub.com; Web site: http://sagepub.com |
| Peer Reviewed: | Y |
| Page Count: | 25 |
| Publication Date: | 2022 |
| Document Type: | Journal Articles Reports - Research |
| Descriptors: | Word Lists, Word Frequency, Teacher Attitudes, Vocabulary Skills, English (Second Language), Language Teachers, English Language Learners, Vietnamese, Vocabulary Development, Student Attitudes, Evaluation, Foreign Countries |
| Geographic Terms: | Vietnam |
| DOI: | 10.1177/1362168820911189 |
| ISSN: | 1362-1688 |
| 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. |
| Abstractor: | As Provided |
| Entry Date: | 2022 |
| Accession Number: | EJ1342333 |
| Database: | ERIC |
| 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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| ISSN: | 1362-1688 |
| DOI: | 10.1177/1362168820911189 |
