This article introduces the NFL7 (Nuclear Family List 7), a list of the 2,887 most frequent "nuclear" word families, that is, families that include just the most frequent family members and exclude those that constitute less than 7% of family occurrences. The NFL7 was developed by using a dedicated computer program, the Nuclear List…

Learners preparing to work in the food service industry should be equipped with food service terminology to enhance their communicative potential. The purpose of this study was to create a Food Service Word List (FSWL) to assist L2 learners of English in English for Specific Purposes classrooms. The Food Service Corpus (FSC) with a size of…

The study evaluated the lexical utility of English 1 and English 2, English language textbooks, which are supervised, produced, and distributed by Punjab Curriculum and Textbook Board. These are officially recommended (compulsory) textbooks for all public sector schools. The study calculated total number of words used (tokens) in the books along…

This study describes academic literacy development during mid-adolescence, when learners need to adjust to the demands of academic discourse as a gateway to linguistic adulthood. Unlike most research to date, which is cross-sectional and detached from disciplinary content, this study provides a two-year longitudinal description of academic…

In a recent unit of study in an undergraduate Health Sciences pathway course, we identified a set of essays which exhibited similarity of content but demonstrated the use of bizarre and unidiomatic language. One of the distinct features of the essays was the inclusion of unusual synonyms in place of expected standard medical terminology. We…

This paper charts the construction of a technical vocabulary list called the Islamic Religious Studies Textbooks Vocabulary (IRSTV) which was developed from the Corpus of Islamic religious studies textbooks (CIRST) in an Indonesian Islamic State Institute (IISI). The study is aimed to meet the need of first-year English language learners studying…

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…

This article describes TextEvaluator, a comprehensive text-analysis system designed to help teachers, textbook publishers, test developers, and literacy researchers select reading materials that are consistent with the text complexity goals outlined in the Common Core State Standards. Three particular aspects of the TextEvaluator measurement…

This study addresses research gaps in predicting second language (L2) writing proficiency using linguistic features. Key to this analysis is the inclusion of linguistic measures at the surface, textbase and situation model level that assess text cohesion and linguistic sophistication. The results of this study demonstrate that five variables…

In this study, a corpus of expert-graded essays, based on a standardized scoring rubric, is computationally evaluated so as to distinguish the differences between those essays that were rated as high and those rated as low. The automated tool, Coh-Metrix, is used to examine the degree to which high- and low-proficiency essays can be predicted by…

The programs WordSmith and VocabProfile were used to research lexical differences between essays written in English by Spanish undergraduates and a set of essays independently judged as being of TWE grade 6 standard. The results indicated that writing by this group of students was generally characterised by low lexical variation, a preponderance…

The report details a study to identify vocabulary needed by Japanese students of English as a Second Language to function successfully in college computer science courses and research laboratory apprenticeships. The vocabulary was then to be taught in the first two semesters of freshman English composition. The study involved development of simple…