Recent scholarship has called for deeper communications and collaborations between writing studies and language studies because such interdisciplinary connections can facilitate the growth of both fields. While research has explored the potential exchanges between writing studies and language-related fields (such as applied linguistics, second…

Published work on vocabulary assessment has grown substantially in the last 10 years, but it is still somewhat outside the mainstream of the field. There has been a recent call for those developing vocabulary tests to apply professional standards to their work, especially in validating their instruments for specified purposes before releasing them…

The words in a language or language variety are often rank ordered in lists that are meant to reflect the relative importance of those words to language users and learners of a language. This rank ordering is done on the basis of the relative prevalence of words in a corpus. Lexical prevalence is often operationalized as measures of frequency,…

This paper sets forth an integrated way of introducing bibliometrics to relatively non-quantitative audiences, such as librarians and iSchool students. The integrative device is the bibliogram, a linguistic object consisting of a seed term and the terms that co-occur with it, ranked by their co-occurrence counts with the seed--a standard…

This article presents our new Academic Vocabulary List (AVL), derived from a 120-million-word academic subcorpus of the 425-million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA; Davies 2012). We first explore reasons why a new academic core list is warranted, and why such a list is still needed in English language education. We also provide…

Despite the vast extent of the English vocabulary, it has been estimated that only around 2400 high frequency word families, which are found on Browne, Culligan, and Phillips' (2013) "New General Service List" (NGSL), make up over 92% of most general English texts. Several studies have shown that a word must be encountered anywhere from…

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…

With the advances in technology, wordlists retrieved from computer corpora have become increasingly popular in recent years. The lexical items in those wordlists are usually selected, according to a set of robust frequency and dispersion criteria, from large corpora of authentic and naturally occurring language. Corpus wordlists are of great value…

This paper aims to be an introduction to the General Service List (GSL) that brings together descriptive data with material otherwise dispersed throughout the literature. The discussion first provides an historical overview of the work that scholars, researchers, and educators used as foundations for the manufacturing of the GSL. Following, a…

Averil Coxhead is widely known for developing the Academic Word List, a list of 570 word families associated with great frequency in academic texts. This list has been particularly useful to teachers of English as a Second Language as well as independent learners in tertiary education. She has also developed a Science-based word list (Coxhead and…

There is little dispute that formulaic sequences form an important part of the lexicon, but to date there has been no principled way to prioritize the inclusion of such items in pedagogic materials, such as ESL/EFL textbooks or tests of vocabulary knowledge. While wordlists have been used for decades, they have only provided information about…

Larry Bates argues for vocabulary instruction that emphasizes useful, high-frequency words rather than lists of rarely used terms. He suggests resources for finding frequency ratings for words and for determining appropriately challenging words for students. (Contains 3 figures and 3 notes.)

This article focuses on the development of vocabulary among English language learners. The author first defines what a "word" means, then discusses five aspects of vocabulary knowledge. Drawing on Swain (1993), the author identifies three main goals of vocabulary learning. The rest of the article is devoted to the description of six…

The 250 most frequently used words in television captions are listed in order of frequency. This table is a correction to the table printed in the article "Instant Reading Incentives: TV Captions," in the September 1997 issue. (DB)

Describes a project that developed a list of the most frequently used words in television captions in order to assist teachers in building on the word recognition strength and reading skills of students with deafness. The list contains 250 words and is included. (CR)