Evaluating lists of high-frequency words

Abstract

This study compared the lexical coverage provided by four wordlists [West’s (1953) General Service List (GSL), Nation’s (2006) most frequent 2,000 British National Corpus word families (BNC2000), Nation’s (2012) most frequent 2,000 British National Corpus and Corpus of Contemporary American-English word families (BNC/COCA2000), and Brezina and Gablasova’s (2015) New-GSL list] in 18 corpora. The comparison revealed that the headwords in the BNC/COCA2000 tended to provide the greatest average coverage. However, when the coverage of the most frequent 1,000, 1,500, and 1,996 headwords in the lists was compared, the New-GSL provided the highest coverage. The GSL had the worst performance using both criteria. Pedagogical and methodological implications related to second language (L2) vocabulary learning and teaching are discussed in detail.