Re: Corpora: plain english

Gordon and Pam Cain (gpcain@rivernet.com.au)
Sun, 30 May 1999 08:40:56 +1000

John Mullen wrote:
>
> I am working with the British national corpus. i need some information on
> how one can judge lexical difficulty for foreign readers of English.

John--
I realise this isn't exactly what you were asking for, but may be of
help:

ISP Nation at Victoria Univ of Wellington (New Zealand) developed a DOS
program 4-5 years ago called 'Vocab Profiler'. Try hunting for it at:

http://www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/staff/Paul_Nation.html

I've only got it to run once so far, but I think that is because I have
not got it into correct ASCII format yet, or some 'funny characters'
remain in my texts.

He includes three word lists to compare texts agains:
*Word forms of the first 1000 most common words in English
*Word forms of the second 1000 most common words
*Close to 1000 other words and their associated forms, not on either
list, but common in general academic English (if such a thing actually
exists. . .)

The program then returns percentages and numbers of the tokens in any
text, that are found in each of these list, plus the percentage and
number found in none of these lists.

Also, you may replace these with your own customised lists.

(Alternatively, you could create your own similar lists, and use a
program like WordSmith to compare percentages of words from various
words in texts.)

Additionally, try these for interest's sake -- they may be along the
lines of what you're after:

Nation and Batia Laufer carried out a joint study using Vocab Profiler
and testing language students in Israel and NZ, and wrote it up in:

'Vocabulary size and use: Lexical richness in L2 written production'
Applied Linguistics 16/3, 1995.

Also, Laufer has done a lot of interesting work on the amount of lexis
needed for reading comprehension (not corpus based, but still
stimulating and valid!!). Start with her article:

'The lexical plight in second language reading. . .' in _Second Language
Vocabulary Acquisition: A rationale for pedagogy' by J Coady and T
Huckin (eds), Cambridge 1997. Work backwards through her bibliography
for further references. As an ESOL teacher of EAP students, I find this
stuff immensely stimulating and fruitful.

Hope this helps, and leads you to something you can use.

Cheers,
Gordon

-- 
Gordon Cain, Teacher of ESOL
TAFE International Education Centre, Liverpool
Sydney, Australia
gpcain@rivernet.com.au