Is There a Core General Vocabulary? Introducing the New General Service List

Abstract

The current study presents a New General Service List (new-GSL), which is a result of robust comparison of four language corpora (LOB, BNC, BE06, and EnTenTen12) of the total size of over 12 billion running words. The four corpora were selected to represent a variety of corpus sizes and approaches to representativeness and sampling. In particular, the study investigates the lexical overlap among the corpora in the top 3,000 words based on the average reduced frequency (ARF), which is a measure that takes into consideration both frequency and dispersion of lexical items. The results show that there exists a stable vocabulary core of 2,122 items (70.7%) among the four corpora. Moreover, these vocabulary items occur with comparable ranks in the individual wordlists. In producing the new-GSL, the core vocabulary items were combined with new items frequently occurring in the corpora representing current language use (BE06 and EnTenTen12). The final product of the study, the new-GSL, consists of 2,494 lemmas and covers between 80.1 and 81.7 per cent of the text in the source corpora.

Computational Method for Supporting Learning with Cumulative Vocabularies, Conceptual Networks and Wikipedia Linkage

“…Brezina and Gablasova [34] estimated that about 46 percent of 3000 highest-ranking words of British National Corpus are nouns (0,46≈1/2,2) which is a greater ratio than a ratio based on our just mentioned approximation that there are 23 percent (0,23≈1/4,3) unique nouns in unique language items of a vocabulary. Anyway since Wikipedia hyperlinks connect now only nouns we assume that a student's explorations among 2878 unique nouns in 25153 unique hyperlinks connecting unique nouns of vocabulary A1&A2&B1&B2&C1&C2 can at least indirectly offer a conceptual exposure and coverage of 2,2-4,3 times greater amount of unique language items (i.e., containing also other part-ofspeech than just nouns) meaning coverage of 6261-12522 unique language items.…”

Specialized word lists: Survey of the literature: Research perspective

“…Coxhead & Hirsch 2007;Chung 2009;Ng et al 2013, Yang 2015. Recently new word lists, with modernized methodologies have been proposed to replace them -the New-GSL (Brezina & Gablasova, 2013) and AVL (Gardner & Davies, 2013). In order to fully grasp the changes that are taking place in this specific field of vocabulary acquisition, the first step will be to discuss the methodology and characteristics of these four word lists.…”

“…Compilation of specific word lists for various fields is one of the most prominent branches of research in this field at the moment. New methodological changes in word list formation have been proposed because of the appearance of the New-GSL (Brezina & Gablasova, 2013) and AVL (Gardner & Davies, 2013). The aim of this paper is twofold.…”

Deliberate Learning Of Second Language (L2) Vocabulary: Research-Based Guidelines

“…Academic words should become the learners' vocabulary learning goal after they have learned [26] GSL and [1] new-GSL wordlists.…”

“…In [26] GSL, [1] new-GSL, [4] AWL, and [7] AVL wordlists are comprised of individual words. They only provide lists of individual words.…”