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

Word List (鄭恆雄, 2002; 2003), which includes the most frequent and useful 4600
words for high school students in Taiwan was employed in order to compensate GSL.
The High School Frequent Word List (HSF) was constructed by consulting previously
developed popular word lists such as GSL and COBUILD (Sinclair, 1995), and
modification on frequent words in these lists were conducted for Taiwanese high
school learners <strong>of</strong> English. It was used as a guideline for writing high school
English textbooks in Taiwan and therefore, college freshmen supposedly should have
already acquired these words when they were in high school. Since the original HSF
word lists does not provide the words belonging in each family, we completed the
words for each family by specifying the common inflectional forms such as –ing, -ly,
or –ed and affixed words such as –un, -ment, or -tion using Visual FoxPro 7.0.
Three teachers were involved in determining items in each word family to ensure the
inclusion for each entry was indeed frequently used. As a result, 7256 words were
determined as the HSF. The GSL and HSF together are thus able to address learners’
background English learning experiences and were determined as familiar word lists
in our on-line extensive reading syllabus.
To identify target word lists, learners’ learning purpose was also our first priority.
That is, depending on learners’ learning goals, learning words in the identified target
word lists should take priority over learning other kinds <strong>of</strong> vocabulary. The first
target word list that we selected was Xue and Nation’s University Word List (UWL,
1984). This word list consists <strong>of</strong> 800 word families, 3685 words, not in the GSL but
frequently found in academic texts (Nation & Kyongho, 1995). This academic
vocabulary gives an 8.5% coverage <strong>of</strong> academic text and 3.9% coverage <strong>of</strong>
newspapers (Kyongho & Nation, 1989). Since our learners are college freshmen
expecting to meet unsimplified English textbooks in future studies, adding UWL as a
target word list could be an introduction to these highly useful academic words.
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