Towards the Development of a Word List for English Newspapers

Abstract

Vocabulary knowledge has been recognized as a crucial component in learning and teaching of both native and non-native learners, text understanding, and educational success (Coxhead, 2018; Saeedi et al., 2023; Schmitt et al., 2021), leading to the development of word lists for different purposes. Hence, this study aimed at developing a newspaper word list including the most frequent words which are highly applicable and useful for understanding different sections of English newspapers. In doing so, a corpus of 1,221,970 words was compiled and analyzed. Based on the three criteria, i.e., frequency, range, and specialization, a word list containing 858-word families was obtained. A combination of the current word list and the general words accounted for 94.64% of tokens (the total number of running words) in the corpus. The results have practical applications for EFL/ESL (English as a Foreign Language/English as a Second Language) learners as well as readers and writers of English newspapers.