| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
WADA Koumei Tezukayama Junior College, Professor, 教授 (40071451)
MATSUI Shinpei Doshisha University, Institute for Language and culture, Lecturer, 言語文化教育研究センター, 嘱託講師
OCHI Reiko Doshisha University, Institute for Language and culture, Lecturer., 言語文化教育研究センター, 専任講師 (30247796)
OKADA Tae Doshisha University, Institute for Language and culture, Professor., 言語文化教育研究センター, 教授 (50066213)
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| Research Abstract |
The ocjective of our research is to identify and list English words to be acquired by Japanese university students in the information age. In the selection of words, we specified the language learners, defined the range of sources of date, and used occurrence frequency counts of vocabulary in the data. The corpus of our research amounts to 2,000,000 running words. The sampling texts from which the corpus was generated include (1) English textbooks used at Japanese junior high schools, (2) those used at Japanese senior high schools, (3) those used at Japanese universities, (4) actual English entrance examinations for Japanese national and private universities, (5) sctual English proficiency examinations (sub-first grade of STEP tests and TOEFL tests), (6) U.S.TV news reports and Federal News Service, and (7) newspapers and journals from abroad. The texts (1)-(5) are included in order to identify vocabulary which Japanese unversity students are supposed to have acquired and are presently
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learning. Those listed in (6) and (7) are used to estimate vocabulary for native speakers of English. This helps in selecting words to be acquired by Japanese university students to enhance their communicative competence in the information age.
The procedure we followed in the analysis of the corpus and the selection of the words is (1) to list different words for the respective categories of the sampling texts and eliminate the words from them which occur in the English textbooks used at Japanese junior high schools, (2) to compare the vocabulary between the lists made by procedure (1) and extract common words appearing in all of these lists, (3) to select 1200 words as an essential vocabulary for university students to acquire and list them as head words, which are high-frequency words appeakring in all the lists, exculuding those loan-words which relatively maintain the original English meahing, such as "gap" and "focus", and (4) to list 300 more words to be learned after the essential 1200 words.
While the corpus of 2,000,000 running words may be small in size statistically when millions of running words can be analyzed with computers, we nevertheless belive that the list of 1500 words we selected will be informative about what vocabulary should be focused on for Japanese university students to learn in the information age. How much the selected first 1200 words and the next 300 words are established among university students will be the subject of our future research. We will also have to develop a program that will automatically group vacabulary with derived and inflected forms under headwords. This will make the size of vocabulary in the corpus smaller and thus easier for the researcher to handle in comparing various categories of lists. Less
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