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Researchers have expressed doubts about the adequacy of the GSL because of its age and the relatively low coverage provided by the words not in the first 1,000 words of the list. Engels was, in particular, critical of the limited vocabulary chosen by West (1953), and while he concurred that the first
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because the range and frequency of these words were too low to be included in the list. Recent research by
Billuroğlu and Neufeld (2005) confirmed that the General Service List was in need of minor revision, but the headwords in the list still provide approximately 80% text coverage in written
109:(NGSL), published in March 2013 by Browne, Culligan and Phillips. The NGSL was based on a 273 million-word subsection of the 2 billion-word Cambridge English Corpus. Preliminary results show that the new list provides a substantially higher degree of coverage with fewer words.
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The GSL evolved over several decades before West's publication in 1953. The GSL is not a list based solely on frequency, but includes groups of words on a semantic basis. Various versions float around the
Internet, and attempts have been made to improve it.
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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.
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The list is important because a person who knows all the words on the list and their related families would understand approximately 90–95 per cent of colloquial speech and 80–85 per cent of common written texts. The list consists only of
381:(Online Graded Text Editor) provided free by Charles Browne and Rob Waring. The tool allows teachers and authors to analyze and edit texts to a specific level using the GSL, NGSL, AWL and other important vocabulary lists.
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the New
General Service List (new-GSL) by Brezina & Gablasova, originally published in Applied Linguistics in 2013. This wordlist is based on the analysis of four language corpora of a total size of over 12 billion
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provided free by Tom Cobb includes several web-based vocabulary profilers, in which you can paste any text and the words are then 'coloured' according to frequency band profiles. Here are two:
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1,000 words of the GSL were good selections based on their high frequency and wide range, he was of the opinion that the words beyond the first 1,000 of the GSL could not be considered
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Brezina, V. & Gablasova, D. (2013). Is There a Core
General Vocabulary? Introducing the New General Service List. Applied Linguistics, retrieved 4 April 2014 from
53:, 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.
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Hancioglu, N., Neufeld, S., & Eldridge, J. (2008). Through the looking glass and into the land of lexico-grammar. English for
Specific Purposes 27/4, 459-479
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Brezina, V. & Gablasova, D. (2015) "Is There a Core
General Vocabulary? Introducing the New General Service List", Applied Linguistics, 36(1), 1–22.
360:, which produces output in coloured form—blue for K1 (the first 1,000 words of the GSL), green for K2 (the second 1,000 words of the GSL), yellow for
135:: a major update of the GSL which provides higher coverage with fewer words than the GSL, developed by Charles Browne, Brent Culligan and Joe Phillips
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is a revised word list for students learning
English which overcomes the problems of treating the GSL and AWL as separate and distinct constructs.
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Billuroğlu, A. & Neufeld, S. (2005). The Bare
Necessities in Lexis: a new perspective on vocabulary profiling. Retrieved September 2007 from
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provides a graphic representation of words by frequency in any text, but is not as yet linked to any specific vocabulary profiling bands.
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A 1995 revised version of the GSL with minor changes, along with a more detailed discussion about the problems in the GSL.
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Nation, P., & Waring, R. (2004). Vocabulary size, text coverage and word lists. Retrieved
September 2007 from
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Dickins, J. (n.d.). Extended
Version of Rank Frequency List: Spoken English, retrieved 3 December 2007 from
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413:
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Bauer, L. and Nation, I.S.P. (1993). Word families, International Journal of Lexicography 6, 3 (1993) 1-27.
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Browne, Charles (July 2013). "The New General Service List: Celebrating 60 years of Vocabulary Learning".
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will return formatted CBA probes or a readability analysis, with bands for Grades 1-3 (US) and Grades 4+
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in 1953. The words were selected to represent the most frequent words of English and were taken from a
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https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/iral.1968.6.issue-1-4/iral.1968.6.1-4.213/iral.1968.6.1-4.213.xml
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Engels, L.K. (1968). The fallacy of word counts. IRAL 6: 213–231. Retrieved August 2019 from
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English. The research showed that the GSL contains a small number of archaic terms, such as
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West, M. 1953. A General Service List of English Words. London: Longman, Green and Co.
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http://applij.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/08/25/applin.amt018.abstract
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of written English. The target audience was English language learners and
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Some ESL dictionaries use the General Service List as their controlled
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https://web.archive.org/web/20080111133710/http://www.wordhacker.com/
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Bullock, D. 'NSM + LDOCE: A Non-Circular Dictionary of English',
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PC-based vocabulary profiling software that includes the GSL:
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Heatley, Nation, and Coxhead's RANGE and FREQUENCY programs
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developed as an extension to the General Service List by
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http://www.languages.salford.ac.uk/staff/dickins.php
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List of roughly 2,000 most frequent words in English
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27:) is a list of roughly 2,000 words published by
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120:Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
553:Japanese-Language Proficiency Test / JLPT
97:There are two major updates of the GSL:
280:http://lextutor.ca/vp/BNL_Rationale.doc
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517:Test of Chinese as a Foreign Language
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259:International Journal of Lexicography
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211:Nation & Waring, 2004; Dickins
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535:Test of Proficiency in Korean
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220:Bauman & Culligan, 1995
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580:Quantitative linguistics
475:New General Service List
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133:New General Service List
107:New General Service List
430:Word lists by frequency
575:Lists of English words
261:, 24/2, 2011: 226–240.
297:5 August 2007 at the
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59:general service words
469:General Service List
335:Bauman's revised GSL
241:The Language Teacher
21:General Service List
432:and number of words
115:defining vocabulary
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156:Academic Word List
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585:Word lists
569:Categories
269:References
72:television
551:list for
533:list for
515:list for
508:list for
117:. In the
51:headwords
545:Japanese
537:(10,635)
295:Archived
247:: 13–15.
127:See also
64:shilling
519:(~8600)
502:Chinese
485:Add-ons
477:(~2800)
465:(~1500)
457:Globish
438:English
144:Globish
76:battery
68:plastic
44:Details
555:(8009)
527:Korean
512:(8848)
471:(2000)
459:(1500)
453:(~875)
391:WORDLE
243:. 34.
102:words.
86:, and
84:victim
33:corpus
494:(570)
447:(850)
385:OKAPI
181:Notes
379:OGTE
105:the
88:drug
80:okay
19:The
312:doi
37:ESL
25:GSL
571::
90:.
82:,
78:,
74:,
70:,
422:e
415:t
408:v
314::
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245:7
23:(
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