Measuring Difficulty Level of Vocabularies Using World-lists

For a long time, TOEIC has been a global standard for measuring English language skills. The goals of this paper are (1) to identify the characteristics that TOEIC vacabularies demonstrate, (2) to measure the difficulty level of TOEIC vacabularies using two kinds of word-lists, and (3) to compare the difficulty level of TOEIC vocabularies with that of high school English textbooks. Two corpora were compiled for this study. First, we used 10 sets of the TOEIC simulation test to compile a TOEIC corpus. Second, we compiled a textbook corpus, for comparison, which contained 28 Korean high school English textbooks. The corpus-analyzing tools we used in the analysis is "NLPTools for English Education Experts." Through the analysis, we found that the TOEIC vocabularies are slightly more difficult than those of the high school English textbooks. This paper can be thought of as a pre-process for developing efficient teaching methods of teaching TOEIC vocabularies to students. In addition, this paper can be a basis for some applications of 'vocabulary control'.