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Front. Inform. Technol. Electron. Eng.  2017, Vol. 18 Issue (3): 362-372    DOI: 10.1631/FITEE.1601118
Regular Papers     
Corpus-based research on English word recognition rates in primary school and word selection strategy
Wen-yan Xiao, Ming-wen Wang, Zhen Weng, Li-lin Zhang, Jia-li Zuo
School of Computer Information Engineering, Jiangxi Normal University, Nanchang 330022, China; Jiangxi of Science and Technology, 330003, China
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Abstract  Acquiring vocabulary is important when studying English, as it assists in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. In this paper, we develop an English webpage corpus (EWC) and create a word frequency list using web crawler technology. By comparing EWC word lists with the British National Corpus (BNC), we find that the BNC word frequency list possesses the feature of timeliness. We also explore primary school students’ English word recognition rates by comparing the word frequency lists of several corpora, including EWC, BNC, SUBTLEX-US, and Subtitle Corpus of Children’s BBC (CBBC). The results show that the word recognition rates for primary school children are relatively low in both general language and specific language register. Motivated by the experiment results, we finally propose some word-selection strategies for compiling English textbooks for Chinese primary school students.

Key wordsCorpus      Primary English      Recognition rate      Word frequency      Coverage rate     
Received: 06 April 2016      Published: 10 March 2017
CLC:  H313  
  TP391  
Cite this article:

Wen-yan Xiao, Ming-wen Wang, Zhen Weng, Li-lin Zhang, Jia-li Zuo. Corpus-based research on English word recognition rates in primary school and word selection strategy. Front. Inform. Technol. Electron. Eng., 2017, 18(3): 362-372.

URL:

http://www.zjujournals.com/xueshu/fitee/10.1631/FITEE.1601118     OR     http://www.zjujournals.com/xueshu/fitee/Y2017/V18/I3/362

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