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Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 23, No. 0, pp. 873-894 | |
Abbreviation: KASELL | |
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online) | |
Received 05 Aug 2023 Revised 13 Oct 2023 Accepted 28 Jan 2023 | |
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.23..202310.873 | |
The Vocabulary List for ELT Textbooks in Language Acquisition and Teaching Methodology | |
Hyeon-Okh Kim ; Hye-Kyung Lee
| |
(1st author) Professor, Dept. of English Ajou University. (hokim67@ajou.ac.kr) | |
(corresponding author) Professor, Dept. of English Ajou University. (hklee@ajou.ac.kr) | |
© 2023 KASELL All rights reserved This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. | |
The study aims to investigate vocabulary demands in academic textbooks for ELT majors, identifying the most frequent word list for preservice teachers and variations in lexical needs across sub-areas. For the purposes, the study compiled a corpus comprising approximately 1.6 million tokens from twelve university textbooks in the integral dimensions of ELT: language acquisition and teaching methodology. By analyzing the lexical coverage of the ELT textbook corpus against the twenty-five 1,000 word-family list from the British National Corpus and Corpus of Contemporary American English (BNC/COCA), the study assessed the lexical load of ELT textbooks and developed an essential vocabulary list. Findings revealed that achieving a 95% lexical coverage in ELT textbooks necessitates mastery of the top 4,000 word families, including proper nouns, interjections, transparent compounds, abbreviations, and glossary terms. To attain 98% coverage, however, ELT students require an 11,000-word family vocabulary. Further analyses show that textbooks in language acquisition demand a higher lexical requirement compared to those in teaching methodology. By applying a set of criteria for widespread use and pedagogical relevance, the study identified 513 word families beyond the initial 2,000 levels on the BNC/COCA, constituting 9.36% of the ELT textbooks. The study suggests practical pedagogical implications.
Keywords: ELT vocabulary, ELT word list, technical vocabulary, discipline-specific word list, vocabulary load, ELT textbooks, corpus analysis |
A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the 2022 KATE SIG Conference, Seoul.
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