[Corpora-List] Criteria for an ESP Vocabulary List

[Brett Reynolds]

The needs of students will vary by level. At the lowest levels, we  
obviously don't want to be teaching students obscure words, and  
you'll spend a lot of time on the most frequent, more grammaticized  
words, often in the guise of grammar instruction, but you'll also  
introduce vocabulary that figures low in general frequency counts but  
high in classroom situations (e.g., pencil, spelling, etc).

As students move into the intermediate levels, I think general  
frequency counts become most valuable. With the huge corpora  
currently available, range should be less of an issue here. Nor do I  
think that, for these learners, polysemy is the bugaboo that it is  
often made out to be, at least in terms of choosing what to learn. If  
I understand the paper correctly, I believe that Kilgarriff <http:// 
www.kilgarriff.co.uk/Publications/2004-K-TSD-CommonestSense.pdf> has  
shown that the most common meaning is usually very common, generally  
accounting for more than half of all uses. To me that makes the most  
common meaning worth studying.

In contrast, it is very rare to get a strong collocation that holds  
true for more than half of the instances of a word. A rare example  
would be "market capitalization", but even there, it's only  
overwhelming from the point of view of 'capitalization', a rather  
rare word. From the point of view of 'market', it's a trivial  
collocation. Generally, "strong" collocations are lucky to hold for  
3% of the instances of the types of words that would be in the top  
2000 word families of English.

The other problem with trying to teach collocations is that there are  
simply too many of them. I'm all in favour of surreptitiously  
including the strongest collocations when presenting a word as part  
of an example sentence, but there just isn't class time to address  
more than a tiny fraction of them. Collocations, I think, mostly have  
to be learned the way native speakers learn them, and for many  
students, that might mean that they simply aren't learned because  
there are more important things to spend your time on.

Finally, as we get up into higher levels of English, general  
frequency will become less important again. Here, people will be  
specializing. I think this is really the place where Ken Hyland's  
arguments against the AWL apply, not at the earlier levels. In fact,  
Ken wrote in an e-mail to me "We agree that the AWL is a truly  
impressive piece of work and probably helpful for general EAP  
purposes and early levels of study."

With respect to frequency and range, I think that in high-level ESP  
situations, an approach similar to Coxhead's in designing the AWL  
would be reasonable, but collocations and senses other than the most  
common will now become more useful. They will, however, only be  
manageable if the corpus is very large but very focussed.

Best,
Brett

<http://english-jack.blogspot.com>

-----------------------
Brett Reynolds
English Language Centre
Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
brett.reynolds at humber.ca



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