Corpus Lists for English Learners: Supporting Reading Comprehension of Digital Science Resources

Abstract

This study explored the lexical coverage of corpus-based vocabulary lists (general, academic, and content-specific) across several million tokens gathered from digital science resources (DSR) for middle school (6–8 grade) students in the United States. The goal was to estimate the extent to which a combination of well-known word lists, mostly designed for the needs of L2 learners, might help students reach text coverage that could result in reasonable comprehension of science texts. The findings of this study show that: (a) the top 570 word families in the newer Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) provide 75% more lexical coverage in the corpus than the 570 word families in the older Academic Word List (AWL), (b) a series of lists designed for second language learners, such as General Service List (GSL), Academic Word List (AWL), and the English for Academic Purposes (EAP) Science List (about 2,900 word families) offer 88.33% coverage, and (c) the GSL and the Middle School Vocabulary List (MSVL) for Science (fewer than 2,500 word families) provide 87.77% coverage.