Core English Vocabulary for EFL Learners: A Corpus-Based Perspective

Abstract

Vocabulary building is one of the major challenges of foreign language learning (Folse, 2004). One of the reasons in this regard is the teacher centered approach of the EFL teachers and the learners are left with little autonomy. Another reason hindering the vocabulary handling of the EFL learners is the long laborious vocabulary lists that EFL learners has to cram without knowing the context. With the emergence of the computers, there have emerged innovations in the theory and practice of the teaching and learning of the EFL vocabulary. Moreover, there is a growing tendency to equip the EFL learners with maximum autonomy in handling foreign vocabulary. Schmitt (2000) asserts that that learning a non-native vocabulary is a continual process as the core vocabulary should encompass the ever changing linguistic needs of the time. Thanks to corpus and its tools that have made the vocabulary task very easy and user friendly. The undertaken study is a systematic effort in this regard to work out core vocabulary of frequent words for EFL learners. The corpus used for the research is The English Web Corpus (enTenTen) that has been made up by collecting text from the internet. Sketch Engine, a corpus tool, has been used to process corpus data and to retrieve word list of English frequent words. The retrieved list of core English vocabulary is supposed to be useful for Urdu language teachers, learners, lexicographers, lexicologists and grammarians.