A primer on the General Service List

This paper aims to be an introduction to the General Service List (GSL) that brings together descriptive data with material otherwise dispersed throughout the literature. The discussion first provides an historical overview of the work that scholars, researchers, and educators used as foundations for the manufacturing of the GSL. Following, a collection of modern studies is presented in an effort to critically assess the contents and intent of the GSL. In this manner, the paper attempts to provide comprehensive information on the manufacture, content, characteristics, and analyses of the GSL that can serve to inform those interested in the GSL, in particular, and the compilation and assessment of new word-lists, in general

FUNCTIONAL LOAD: TRANSCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS OF THE 10,000 MOST FREQUENT WORDS IN SPOKEN ENGLISH

Not all aspects of a language have equal importance for speakers or for learners. From the point of view of language description, functional load is a construct that attempts to establish quantifiable hierarchies of relevance among elements of a linguistic class. This paper makes use of analyses conducted on the 10-million-word spoken subcorpus of the British National Corpus in order to characterize what amounts to approximately 97% of the phonological forms and components heard and produced by fluent speakers in a range of contexts. Our aim is to provide segmental, sequential, and syllabic level rankings of spoken English that can serve as the basis for reference and subsequent work by language educators and researchers

Corpus-Based Frequency Profiling: Migration To A Word List Based On The British National Corpus

The selection and assessment of ELT materials involve multiple criteria. The use of frequency word lists to profile the vocabulary makeup of a text is one such criterion. It provides a quantifiable characterization and classification of lexical material in terms of corpus-based frequency measures. The process of vocabulary profiling is not without challenges, first among which is the identification of a word list adequate for ELT. The choice will determine the amount of information, if any, that can be derived from a text. This paper provides an appraisal of a frequency word list based on the British National Corpus (BNC) and shows the benefits that can be gained by profiling with this list rather than with the long-established General Service List (West, 1953)