How to build an efficient word list ? What are the limits of word frequency measures ? These issues are relevant to readability.

First, a word about the context : word lists are used to find difficulties and to try to improve the teaching material, whereas word frequency is used in psychological linguistics to measure cognitive processing. Thus, this topic deals with education science, psychological linguistics and corpus linguistics.

Coxhead’s Academic Word List

The academic word list by Averil Coxhead is a good example of this approach. He finds that students are not generally familiar with academic vocabulary, giving following examples : substitute, underlie, establish and inherent (p. 214). According to him, this kind of words are are “supportive” but not “central” (these adjectives could be good examples as well).

He starts from principles from corpus linguistics and states that “a register such as academic texts encompasses a variety of subregisters”, one has to balance the corpus.

Coxhead’s methodology is interesting. As one can see he probably read the works of Douglas Biber or John Sinclair, just to name a few. (AWL stands for Academic Word List.)

« To establish whether the AWL maintains high coverage over academic texts other than those in …

As I try to put my notes in order by the end of this year, I changed a series of references, most notably in the bibliography and in the links sections.

Bibliography

I just updated the bibliography, using new categories. I divided the references in two main sections:

Corpus Linguistics, Complexity and Readability Assessment

• Corpus Linguistics and Corpus Building
• Complexity and Linguistic Complexity Theory
• Text Comprehension and Readability Theory
• Readability Formulas
• Readability Assessment

Background

• General Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Measurement Theory
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Technology
• Miscellaneous Tools
• Tagging and Marking

Links

First of all, I updated the links section using the W3C Link Validator. It is very useful, as it points out dead links and moved pages.

Resources for German

This is a new subsection:

• LINSE, the linguistics portal of the University of Essen
• Quantitative Linguistics Bibliography for German
• DeReWo – corpus-based wordlists, a project of the IDS Mannheim
• German SUBTLEX-DE word frequencies
• Lothar Lemnitzer’s Wortwarte (detection and sampling of neologisms)

Other links

I added a subsection to the links about LaTeX: LaTeX for Humanities (and Linguists).

I also added new tools and new Perl links.