Article |
| Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 61-94 |
| Abbreviation: APJCR |
| e-ISSN: 2733-8096 |
| Publication date: 31 August 2020 |
| Received: 29 June 2020 / Received in Revised Form: 31 July 2020 / Accepted: 14 August 2020 |
| DOI: https://doi.org/10.22925/apjcr.2020.1.1.61
|
The Ratios of CEFR-J Vocabulary Usage Compared with GSL and AWL in Elementary EFL Classrooms and Suggestions of Vocabulary Items to be Taught |
| Yukiko Ohashi (Yamazaki University of Animal Health Technology)
Noriaki Katagiri (Hokkaido University of Education) |
| Copyright 2020 APJCR
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Abstract |
| The present study examined vocabulary usage in elementary English classrooms in Japan using elementary school corpus. The authors used three wordlists to benchmark the lexical items for four classes in the corpus: the CEFR-J, the General Service List (GSL), and Academic Word List (AWL). The percentage of vocabulary usage belonging to the Level A1 in the CEFR-J was below 15% (Class A: 12.1%, Class B: 12.6%, Class C: 8.9%, and Class D: 13.6%) with no statistical difference between levels. The mean ratio of Level A2 vocabulary items was below 10%, and all classes showed less than 1% of vocabulary usage for the Levels B1 and B2. Over 70% of all vocabulary items in the corpus belonged to the most frequent 1,000-word band (level 1) of the GSL, while the next most frequent word band (level 2 of the GSL and AWL) accounted for less than 10%. The results suggest that elementary school English teachers should use more vocabulary items in the CEFR-J Level A1. The findings demonstrate that elementary school teachers are less likely to expose their pupils to grammatically well-structured sentences with an abundance of lexical items since the teachers repeatedly use the same lexemes in each class. |
Keywords |
| Corpus Linguistics, Primary Education, CEFR-J, GSL, AWL |
References |
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The Authors’ Addresses |
| First and Corresponding Author Yukiko Ohashi Professor Yamazaki University of Animal Health Technology 4-7-2 Minami-Osawa, Hachioji, Tokyo 192-0364, JAPAN E-mail: y_watanabe@yamazaki.ac.jp Co-author |
