Research On Chinese Core Word-list Based On Specific Business Context

With the rapid development of Chinese economy and the career of teaching Chinese as a foreign language,the value of Business Chinese is becoming increasingly prominent.Business Chinese,as a branch of Teaching Chinese for Special Purpose,is also gradually valued.Words are the basis of the second language teaching,and the core word-list is of great help for learners to build up a word library in a short time.However,in the field of Business Chinese teaching,apart from the Business Chinese Test Syllabus for test and the general Chinese vocabulary syllabus such as the HSK Vocabulary and Character Grading Level,there is no guidebook nor core word-list for vocabulary teaching and textbook compilation.In order to solve the problem above,this study aims to create a Business Chinese core word-list based on specific business context.First of all,by reviewing existing word-list,it is found that they are lack of classification and unable to satisfy diversified needs of learners,so this paper attempts to demonstrate the value and rationality of creating word-list based on “context” from the perspective of social linguistics,psycholinguistics and computer linguistics.In order to figure out the latest needs of second language learners and decide the source of corpus,this paper conducts a quantitative study based on questionnaire.By sending out questionnaires to the third year undergraduates major in Chinese literature in Nanjing to make a survey on their learning motivation and evaluation of Business Chinese courses.Statistics show that over 70% of the students are interested in topics about jog-hunting.However,the evaluation of current Business Chinese courses is not good,only 30% of the students say that they can learn a lot of useful words in business Chinese courses,which confirms the necessity of creating new core word-list..This paper considers frequency and text coverage of words,and combines“Correlation Subtraction” with human intervention to screen business vocabulary.A corpus based on real material related to specific context are also set up.Then three kinds of Chinese processing software are also used in terms of automatic word segmentation,word frequency and co-selecting word-list.This study is firstly to create a Business Chinese core word-list in the field of Teaching Chinese for Special Purpose,which is different from the previous word-lists only by phonetic or frequency order.Word-list in this paper classifies words by meaning with Chinese Pinyin marked,which not only facilitates the index for second language learners,but also provides convenience for subsequent update of the word-list.It would be a fortune if this study can be a reference for vocabulary teaching in Business Chinese courses and the compilation of Business Chinese Textbooks.And also hopes that the way of creating word-list based on context can provide some new ideas for the development of Business Chinese core word-list and dictionary.