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General Service List
The General Service List (GSL) is a list of roughly 2,000 words published by Michael West in 1953. The words were selected to represent the most frequent words of English and were taken from a corpus of written English. The target audience was English language learners and ESL teachers. To maximize the utility of the list, some frequent words that overlapped broadly in meaning with words already on the list were omitted. In the original publication the relative frequencies of various senses of the words were also included. Details The list is important because a person who knows all the words on the list and their related families would understand approximately 90–95 percent of colloquial speech and 80–85 percent of common written texts. The list consists only of headwords, which means that the word "be" is high on the list, but assumes that the person is fluent in all forms of the word, e.g. am, is, are, was, were, being, and been. Researchers have expressed doubts about th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Michael Philip West
Michael Philip West (1888–1973) was an English language teacher and researcher who worked extensively in India in the mid 1900s. He produced the reading scheme "The New Method Readers" (Longmans, Green and Co) and A General Service List of English Words (Longman, Harlow, Essex Harlow is a large town and local government district located in the west of Essex, England. Founded as a new town, it is situated on the border with Hertfordshire and London, Harlow occupies a large area of land on the south bank of the upper ..., 1953). References * Further reading "Michael West" entry in the Warwick ELT Archive Hall of Fame*Biography* 1888 births 1973 deaths Teachers of English as a second or foreign language {{edu-bio-stub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Text Corpus
In linguistics, a corpus (plural ''corpora'') or text corpus is a language resource consisting of a large and structured set of texts (nowadays usually electronically stored and processed). In corpus linguistics, they are used to do statistical analysis and statistical hypothesis testing, hypothesis testing, checking occurrences or validating linguistic rules within a specific language territory. In Search engine (computing), search technology, a corpus is the collection of documents which is being searched. Overview A corpus may contain texts in a single language (''monolingual corpus'') or text data in multiple languages (''multilingual corpus''). In order to make the corpora more useful for doing linguistic research, they are often subjected to a process known as annotation. An example of annotating a corpus is part-of-speech tagging, or ''POS-tagging'', in which information about each word's part of speech (verb, noun, adjective, etc.) is added to the corpus in the form o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
English As A Foreign Or Second Language
English as a second or foreign language is the use of English by speakers with different native languages. Language education for people learning English may be known as English as a second language (ESL), English as a foreign language (EFL), English as an additional language (EAL), English as a New Language (ENL), or English for speakers of other languages (ESOL). The aspect in which ESL is taught is referred to as teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL), teaching English as a second language (TESL) or teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL). Technically, TEFL refers to English language teaching in a country where English is not the official language, TESL refers to teaching English to non-native English speakers in a native English-speaking country and TESOL covers both. In practice, however, each of these terms tends to be used more generically across the full field. TEFL is more widely used in the UK and TESL or TESOL in the US. The term "ESL" has ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Headword
In morphology and lexicography, a lemma (plural ''lemmas'' or ''lemmata'') is the canonical form, dictionary form, or citation form of a set of word forms. In English, for example, ''break'', ''breaks'', ''broke'', ''broken'' and ''breaking'' are forms of the same lexeme, with ''break'' as the lemma by which they are indexed. ''Lexeme'', in this context, refers to the set of all the inflected or alternating forms in the paradigm of a single word, and ''lemma'' refers to the particular form that is chosen by convention to represent the lexeme. Lemmas have special significance in highly inflected languages such as Arabic, Turkish and Russian. The process of determining the ''lemma'' for a given lexeme is called lemmatisation. The lemma can be viewed as the chief of the principal parts, although lemmatisation is at least partly arbitrary. Morphology The form of a word that is chosen to serve as the lemma is usually the least marked form, but there are several exceptions such as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
New General Service List
The New General Service List (NGSL) is a list of 2,818 words (lemmas) claimed to be the core vocabulary of the English language published by Dr. Charles Browne, Dr. Brent Culligan and Joseph Phillips in March 2013. The words in the NGSL represent the most important high frequency words of the English language for second language learners of English and is a major update of Michael West's 1953 GSL. Although there are more than 600,000 word families in the English language, the 2,800 words in the NGSL give more than 90% coverage for learners when trying to read most general texts of English. The main goals of the NGSL project were to (1) modernize and greatly increase the size of the corpus used by, and to (2) create a list of words that provided a higher degree of coverage with fewer words than, the original GSL. The 273-million-word subsection of the more than two-billion-word Cambridge English Corpus is about 100 times larger than the 2.5 million word corpus developed in the 1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Defining Vocabulary
A defining vocabulary is a list of words used by lexicographers to write dictionary definitions. The underlying principle goes back to Samuel Johnson's notion that words should be defined using 'terms less abstruse than that which is to be explained', and a defining vocabulary provides the lexicographer with a restricted list of high-frequency words which can be used for producing simple definitions of any word in the dictionary. Defining vocabularies are especially common in English monolingual learner's dictionaries. The first such dictionary to use a defining vocabulary was the ''New Method English Dictionary'' by Michael West and James Endicott (published in 1935), a small dictionary written using a defining vocabulary of just 1,490 words. When the ''Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English'' was first published in 1978, its most striking feature was its use of a 2,000-word defining vocabulary based on Michael West's General Service List, and since then defining vocabulari ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Longman Dictionary Of Contemporary English
The ''Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English'' (''LDOCE''), first published by Longman in 1978, is an advanced learner's dictionary, providing definitions using a restricted vocabulary, helping non-native English speakers understand meanings easily. It is available in four configurations: * Printed book * Premium online access * Printed book plus premium online access * Reduced online version with no access charge (called "free" but technically "gratis": the license is still proprietary) The dictionary is currently in its sixth edition. The premium website was revised in 2014 and 2015. It now offers over a million corpus examples (exceeding the paper version's), and includes sound files for every word, 88,000 example sentences, and various tools for study, teaching, examinations and grammar. The 9000 Most Important English Words to Learn have been highlighted via the Longman Communication 9000. The free online version was updated in 2008 and offers search (with spelling ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
International English
International English is the concept of using the English language as a global means of communication similar to an international auxiliary language, and often refers to the movement towards an international standard for the language. Related and sometimes synonymous terms include: Global English, World English, Common English, Continental English, General English, Engas (English as associate language), and Globish. Sometimes, these terms refer to the actuality of the situation, where English is spoken and used in numerous dialects around the world. These terms may acknowledge the diversity and varieties of English spoken throughout the world. Sometimes however, these related terms refer to a desired standardisation (i.e., Standard English), but there is no consensus on the path to this goal. There have been many proposals for making International English more accessible to people from different nationalities; Basic English is an example, but it failed to make progress. Mor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Globish (Nerriere)
Globish may refer to: * Globish (Gogate), an artificial language created by Madhukar Gogate related to, but independent of, standard English * Globish (Nerrière), a subset of standard English words compiled by Jean-Paul Nerrière * Global English, the concept of the English language as a global means of communication {{disambiguation ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Basic English
Basic English (British American Scientific International and Commercial English) is an English-based controlled language created by the linguist and philosopher Charles Kay Ogden as an international auxiliary language, and as an aid for teaching English as a second language. Basic English is, in essence, a simplified subset of regular English. It was presented in Ogden's book ''Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar''. The first work on Basic English was written by two Englishmen, Ivor Richards of Harvard University and Charles Kay Ogden of the University of Cambridge in England. The design of Basic English drew heavily on the semiotic theory put forward by Ogden and Richards in their book ''The Meaning of Meaning''. Ogden's Basic, and the concept of a simplified English, gained its greatest publicity just after the Allied victory in World War II as a means for world peace. He was convinced that the world needed to gradually eradicate minority languages ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Academic Word List
The Academic Word List (AWL) is a word list of 570 English words which appear with great frequency in a broad range of academic texts. The target readership is English as a second or foreign language students intending to enter English-medium higher education, and teachers of such students. The AWL was developed by Averil Coxhead at the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and divided into ten sublists in decreasing order of frequency. The AWL excludes words from the ''General Service List'' (the 2000 highest-frequency words in general texts); however, many words in the AWL are general vocabulary rather than restricted to an academic domain, such as ''area'', ''approach'', ''create'', ''similar'', and ''occur'' in Sublist One. The list is available on the Simple English Wiktionary. See also *General Service List The General Service List (GSL) is a list of roughly 2,000 words published by Michael West in 1953. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Swadesh List
The Swadesh list ("Swadesh" is pronounced ) is a classic compilation of tentatively universal concepts for the purposes of lexicostatistics. Translations of the Swadesh list into a set of languages allow researchers to quantify the interrelatedness of those languages. The Swadesh list is named after linguist Morris Swadesh. It is used in lexicostatistics (the quantitative assessment of the genealogical relatedness of languages) and glottochronology (the dating of language divergence). Because there are several different lists, some authors also refer to "Swadesh lists". Versions and authors Morris Swadesh himself created several versions of his list. He started with a list of 215 meanings (falsely introduced as a list of 225 meanings in the paper due to a spelling error), which he reduced to 165 words for the Salish-Spokane-Kalispel language. In 1952, he published a list of 215 meanings,Swadesh 1952: 456–PDF/ref> of which he suggested the removal of 16 for being unclear or not ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
