The Academic Spoken Word List

The linguistic features of academic spoken English are different from those of academic written English. Therefore, for this study, an Academic Spoken Word List (ASWL) was developed and validated to help second language (L2) learners enhance their comprehension of academic speech in English‐medium u...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inLanguage learning Vol. 67; no. 4; pp. 959 - 997
Main Authors Dang, Thi Ngoc Yen, Coxhead, Averil, Webb, Stuart
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Hoboken Wiley-Blackwell 01.12.2017
Wiley Subscription Services, Inc
Subjects
academic spoken discourse
Academic standards
American English
British English
Comprehension
Computational Linguistics
Corpus linguistics
corpus research
English
English (Second Language)
English as a second language
English as a second language instruction
English for Academic Purposes
Higher Education
Language of Instruction
North American English
Second Language Learning
Speech
Speech Communication
Spoken language
Validity
Vocabulary
Vocabulary development
Vocabulary Skills
Word Frequency
Word Lists
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Summary:The linguistic features of academic spoken English are different from those of academic written English. Therefore, for this study, an Academic Spoken Word List (ASWL) was developed and validated to help second language (L2) learners enhance their comprehension of academic speech in English‐medium universities. The ASWL contains 1,741 word families with high frequency and wide range in an academic spoken corpus totaling 13 million words. The list, which features vocabulary from 24 subjects across four equally sized disciplinary subcorpora, is graded into four levels according to Nation's British National Corpus and Corpus of Contemporary American English lists, and each level is divided into sublists of function words and lexical words. Depending on their vocabulary levels, language learners may reach 92–96% coverage of academic speech with the aid of the ASWL. Open Practices This article has been awarded Open Materials and Open Data badges. The composition of the corpora, the Academic Spoken Word List, and sublists are publicly accessible via the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/gwk45 and the IRIS digital repository at http://www.iris‐database.org. Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki.
Bibliography:We would like to thank the reviewers and editor for their useful feedback, and the following publishers and researchers for their generosity in letting us use their materials to create our corpora: Cambridge University Press, Pearson, Lynn Grant, the lecturers at Victoria University of Wellington, the researchers in the British Academic Spoken English corpus project, the British Academic Written English corpus project, the International Corpus of English project, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Open courseware project, the Open Amerian National corpus project, the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American‐English project, the Stanford Engineering Open courseware project, the University of California, Berkeley Open courseware project, and the Yale University Open courseware project.
ISSN:0023-8333
1467-9922
DOI:10.1111/lang.12253