Lexitronics Research Overview

In our research:

  • We argue that treating the General Service List (GSL) and the Academic Word List (AWL) as distinct constructs is not sustainable.
  • We suggest there are good reasons for revising general lists of word frequency to  incorporate the majority of the items in the AWL.
  • We describe the development of such a list – the Billuroglu-Neufeld list (BNL).
  • We describe research indicating that what ESP practitioners require in addition to general frequency lists are banks of lexico-structural items and collocates with genre-specific attributes and functions, not an add-on Academic Word List.
  • We argue for regular use of vocabulary profiling tools in the work of English language instructors.
  • We show that most commercial coursebooks do not satisfy the lexical needs of learners, and that supplementary vocabulary work remains essential for most learners.

Research details:

  1. Deficiencies of the GSL
  2. Anomalies of the AWL
  3. Development of the BNL
  4. A Corpus Informed Approach to EAP
  5. THE WORLD OF WORDLISTS: Some Methodology and Pedagogy
  6. Application of Lexical Principles in Commercial Course books