Corpus-based research on English word recognition rates in primary school and word selection strategy

2017, Volume 18, Issue 3

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Frontiers of Information Technology & Electronic Engineering >> 2017, Volume 18, Issue 3 doi: 10.1631/FITEE.1601118

Corpus-based research on English word recognition rates in primary school and word selection strategy

. School of Computer Information Engineering, Jiangxi Normal University, Nanchang 330022, China.. Jiangxi University of Science and Technology, Nanchang 330003, China

Available online: 2017-04-06

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Abstract

Acquiring vocabulary is important when studying English, as it assists in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. In this paper, we develop an English webpage corpus (EWC) and create a word frequency list using web crawler technology. By comparing EWC word lists with the British National Corpus (BNC), we find that the BNC word frequency list possesses the feature of timeliness. We also explore primary school students’ English word recognition rates by comparing the word frequency lists of several corpora, including EWC, BNC, SUBTLEX-US, and Subtitle Corpus of Children’s BBC (CBBC). The results show that the word recognition rates for primary school children are relatively low in both general language and specific language register. Motivated by the experiment results, we finally propose some word-selection strategies for compiling English textbooks for Chinese primary school students.

Keywords

Corpus ; Primary English ; Recognition rate ; Word frequency ; Coverage rate

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