Author: Natasha LeesPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 168
Book Description
It is not realistic for language students to aim at learning all the L2 vocabulary. Naturally, the most basic and widely used vocabulary needed for essential communication is a component of the first level courses in any given language acquisition program. But with limited time and resources available, what vocabulary should be taught past lower level courses? Since L2 learners are limited as to the amount of vocabulary they can learn, the question that needs to be answered is what the essential vocabulary items for communication are. For students whose goal is to become language instructors, linguists, translators or interpreters, L2 is at the core of both their academic training and their future professional activity. On the other hand, for future engineers, physicians, IT professionals and science researchers, L2 is merely a tool, a means to an end. An efficient L2 learning program is especially important for this latter group in particular, since the main focus of their academic training is not L2. The criteria of frequency, uniformity of frequency, and range have been used in the design of English word lists to answer the questions raised above. These same criteria were utilized in this study to create a Spanish Academic Word List, a list of word families that appear frequently and uniformly across genres of academic texts, when subjected to a corpus search.