The Lexical Coverage Of College English Test Vocabulary Over General English

Nowadays lexical study plays a prominent role in the second language acquisition and teaching. With the rapid development of modern society, colleges pay more attention to general English, because non-English major students also need to read English newspapers and magazines; they also need to listen to English radio broadcast; and they also need to communicate and exchange information with each other effectively in English. These fields of English belong to general English, and non-English major students have a great need for it. However, nobody has done the research on the lexical coverage of College English Test vocabulary over general English. Samples with 1,000,000 words are selected randomly from British National Corpus, which is a representative example of general English. These 1,000,000 words consist of 500 texts with the average size of 2,000 words. Based on 500 BNC samples, this paper explores the following questions;1) What is the lexical coverage rate of CET word lists over each.BNC text sample and over the entire BNC samples?2) Can CET word lists provide non-English major students with the adequate reading comprehension of general English? If not, then how to bridge the gap?3) What words are the high frequency words in BNC samples, and what's the relationship between the high frequency words and the CET word lists?The results show that the coverage rates of the CET word lists in 500 BNC samples are normally distributed, and the mean coverage rate of CET-Overall word list is 92.6%. The CET-Overall word list is essential to reading comprehension of general English, but it is far from enough to reach the 95 percent coverage. That is to say, although non-English major students can master all the words in CET word lists, they still have difficulties in reading comprehension of general English. Therefore, this paper proposes a supplementary word list from BNC samples. After adding the supplementary word list to the CET-Overall word list, the mean coverage rate over 500 BNC samples can reach 95.4%. It is also concluded that CET-Overall word list has a high coverage rate in the high frequency BNC words. It further proves that CET-Overall word list is very important in understanding the BNC context.