Corpora: plain english

John Mullen (JohnCMullen@compuserve.com)
Fri, 28 May 1999 08:10:59 -0400

I am working with the British national corpus. i need some information on
how one can judge lexical difficulty for foreign readers of English. Can
somebody give me references where I could find information about

- the number of different words understod by native speakers, on average,
at different ages
- the number of different words understood by foreign learners of English
at different stages
- the number of different words used in various forms of "simplified
English".

I would be most grateful

John Mullen
University of Metz, France