A Study On The Teacher's Word Book Of 30, 000 Words And General Service List

This thesis aims at studying two classic wordlists-the Teacher's Word Book of 30,000 Words (TTW) and General Service List (GSL)-from the perspectives of text coverage and word frequency distribution in contemporary English. In this research, 500 written texts of around 2,000 words each, totaling one million, were drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC) and the same number of samples of about 2,000 words each were obtained from Jiao Da English for Science and Technology (JDEST) as well. These two sets of samples represent general English and technical English respectively. The text coverage of the two wordlists over these two sets of samples and the word frequency distribution in BNC and JDEST were computed with tailor-written FoxPro programs and were further processed and analyzed by SPSS. The results were then compared with those of College English Test Band 4 and Band 6 Wordlist (CETW).The results show that:(1) The mean text coverage of TTW and GSL over the BNC samples is 94.27% and 76.00% respectively. The maximum text coverage of TTW is 97.57% and that of GSL is 90.63%.(2) The mean text coverage of TTW and GSL over the JDEST samples is 90.93% and 70.21% respectively. The maximum text coverage of TTW is 96.87% and that of GSL is 82.76%.(3) The top 50 covered words by TTW, GSL and CETW over BNC and JDEST samples are almost the same, most of which are function words.(4) The number of shared words between TTW and CETW is 5,483, accounting for 98.95% of CETW and the number of words shared by GSL and CETW is 2,196, accounting for 96.15% of GSL. These three wordlists have a common vocabulary of around 2000 words.After the quantitative and qualitative analysis, the following conclusions can be drawn: (1) TTW and GSL have higher text coverage in general English than in technical English. TTW's text coverage is over 95%, the threshold for the adequate comprehension of a text.(2) TTW, GSL and CETW share remarkably identical common core words.(3) Core vocabulary remains the same despite the lexical change. Core vocabulary is significant to lexical teaching and learning and should be taken as a focus in every stage of L2 acquisition.(4) Word frequency, though inadequate to some extend, is the first and foremost criterion of word selection.