Abstract:

The presenter has spent the past decade researching, developing and creating free, open-source vocabulary lists as well as a wide range of online tools to help meet the needs of ESL/EFL learners, teachers, content-developers and teachers. This presentation will provide an introduction to 5 of these corpus-derived word lists as well as demonstrate several of the many free online tools and resources that have been specifically developed to utilize the lists.

The first of the lists is known as the New General Service List (or NGSL). The NGSL represents the most frequently occurring words of general WRITTEN English for EFL learners, and is a major update of Michael West's (1953) General Service List. Based on a carefully selected 273 million word sample from the Cambridge English corpus, the 2800+ words of the NGSL offers approximately 92% coverage of most texts of general English, the highest of any published word list to date.

Based on the 3 spoken sup-corpora of the NGSL, we have also developed a list of the most frequency occurring words of SPOKEN English known as the NGSL-S, which achieves over 90% coverage of spoken English with only 718 words.

The third list, known as the New Academic Word List (NAWL), is based on a 288 million word corpus of academic textbooks, lectures and texts that were gathered from a wide range of sources. When combined with the NGSL, the NAWL's 960 academic words provide approximately 92% coverage for most academic texts, again among the highest coverage achieved by any publicly available list of academic English.

Our fourth list is known as the TOEIC Service List (TSL), and is based on a large corpus of TOEIC exams and TOEIC preparation materials. When combined with the NGSL, the TSL’s 1000 words provide an extremely high 99% coverage of words that occur in TOEIC exams.

The final list is known as the Business English List (BSL) is based on a corpus of 64 million words of business texts, newspapers, journals and websites. When combined with the NGSL, the BSL’s 1700 words provides learners with approximately 97% coverage of the English they would encounter in most general business texts.

After introducing the 5 lists, the presenter will then move on to introduce and demonstrate several of the large and growing number of free online tools we’ve developed which includes interactive flashcards, iPhone and Android vocabulary learning apps, vocabulary diagnostic and placement tests, vocabulary learning games, vocabulary profiling tools, text creation tools, and more.

Keywords:

vocabulary, corpus, online learning, flashcards