Effects of Graded Texts on EFL College Students' Incidental ...

minimized by learning high frequent words before less frequent words, several word
lists such as Thorndike and Lorge’s list and Kucera and Francis’s list have been
developed using the method <strong>of</strong> recording frequency counts <strong>of</strong> lexical items in actual
samples <strong>of</strong> language (Ghadessy, 1979). Among the word lists, the General Service
List (GSL, West, 1953) has remained as the most prominent word list today published.
Containing around 2000 word families, the GSL typically covers around 80% <strong>of</strong> the
running words in any text (Nation, 2001).
Recent research on constructing word lists as pedagogical material has
progressed beyond formulating a basic vocabulary list into two major aspects:
empirical testing on using word lists to facilitate vocabulary learning and
development <strong>of</strong> word lists for higher level learners <strong>of</strong> various learning needs.
Positive evidence for using word lists to accelerate vocabulary growth was found in
empirical studies, followed by further detailed course designs based on word lists
(Cobb & Horst, 2001; Flowerdew, 1993; Worthington & Nation, 1996). Cobb and
Horst (2001) recruited 58 ESL university students <strong>of</strong> intermediate level to study a
word list roughly equivalent to the GSL, the 2,387-word Cambridge Lexicon, with the
help <strong>of</strong> a concordancer, PET。2000. The results showed that learners were able to
successfully acquire a gain <strong>of</strong> 180 words within two months, or 1,080 words if
learning continued for a year.
Word counts in concordancers were suggested by Flowerdew (1993) as a tool for
course design. He maintained that by using a corpus <strong>of</strong> written and/or spoken text
from the target communicative situation with words appearing at different frequencies,
each level <strong>of</strong> frequency in the concordancer <strong>of</strong>fers a potential cut-<strong>of</strong>f point for
selection and grading <strong>of</strong> items. A robust lexical syllabus accompanied with precise
word counts is therefore available for classroom use.
The second research direction on word list vocabulary learning concentrates on
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