LEARNER-ORIENTED BASIC VOCABULARY: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY

The article investigates theoretical and practical problems posed by the global status of English for specific purposes (ESP) which interfere with corpora and language learning. Lexical competence is viewed as an important component of the linguistic and communicative competence, which presupposes learner’s knowledge of the ESP vocabulary and the ability to use it in speech. However, the vocabulary length remains one of the vexed problems in ESP teaching. The article focuses on a corpus-based analysis of the research article lexis in English. The corpus includes 47 research articles in programming about 500 000 words long. The lexical structure of the research articles is studied with a view to frequency, stratification and language acquisition characteristics. Programming tools and the technology of the corpus-based study are presented. Principles of basic vocabulary selection are discussed with an overview of existing learner-oriented vocabularies in ESP. Principles of lexis minimization include lexis lemmatization, frequency analysis, stratification, grouping, etc. The resulting ESP learner vocabulary is 867 units long, which seems quite adequate for teaching and learning purposes. Morphological analysis of the basic vocabulary showed its noun-oriented character. Stratification of the vocabulary lexis into common, general science and terminological resulted in all groups of lexis being fuzzy entities with their specific meanings actualized only in context. The research led to the compilation of the Learner’s English-Russian Dictionary in Programming. Perspectives of further research are outlined.