Sessions

Creating vocabulary lists based on corpus linguistics

Teaching vocabulary is integral to teaching language. However, selecting which words should be taught can be extremely challenging. In order to enhance students’ fluency and vocabulary, 110 Freshman students at a private university in Chiba were given Web, Sasao and Ballance’s Vocabulary Levels Test Version B (2017) at the beginning of the 2019 academic year to determine their vocabulary level. Based on the results of the test, the corresponding BNC/COCA headwords lists were then used to select the vocabulary words to be used in this study. As those lists include only headwords listed in alphabetical order, it was necessary to alter the lists in order to make them more useful for classroom purposes. First, the BNC/ COCA lists were reorganized based on frequency. The lists were then lemmatized to avoid confusion (i.e., direct, directed). Polysemy was taken into consideration when choosing the most core meaning of the word . A sentence in which that word sense was used was provided for context. Finally, the most common kanji used for the head word was added and a translated version of the sentence was provided. The lists were created to provide a stronger base for students to remember the word lists and to connect those words back to their L1. This presentation will discuss how the lists were created, the rationale behind it, and how they can be used.