아동용 코퍼스 구축 및 초등영어 어휘선정 연구

study on the construction of a corpus for children and vocabulary selection for the primary school English curriculum

This paper discusses the development and evaluation of a new basic wordlist, which enlarged the current vocabulary size of the primary school English curriculum. A corpus of 17 million running words of texts written for children aged 1-11 was compiled to select words for young learners. The initial list of 1193 words chosen from the corpus through a series of the selection process was reviewed by two primary English teachers filtering out inappropriate words for elementary school students. The final wordlist was then analyzed about its text coverage and phonological characteristics. 204 words from the initial list were judged inappropriate for young learners by the teachers, which produced the final list of 1037 words. The number of syllables and alphabet characters seemed to play a role in the teachers' judgments. The final wordlist achieved 80.41 percent text coverage of the corpus. The results demonstrate that vocabulary from a corpus of texts for children showed far higher text coverage than words from corpora not targeted for children such as British National Corpus, suggesting the need of a corpus for young L2 learners. The findings indicate that young learners can be taught more effectively with a basic wordlist compiled from texts for children.