Comparing the EWL and NGSL-S 1.2 vocabulary and its English profile levels distribution
Comparing the EWL and NGSL-S 1.2 vocabulary and its English profile levels distribution

Summary/Abstract: When creating EFL content for beginners, teachers sometimes rely on frequency-based corpora. However, taking into account the CEFR levels associated with vocabulary is also important. Some words, even though frequently encountered, can turn out to be too complex for successful acquisition by beginners. The English Vocabulary Profile (English Vocabulary Profile 2015) associates words with a certain CEFR level. The current research compares the vocabulary entries of EWL (Dang and Webb 2016: 153–167, 188–195) and NGSL–Spoken 1.2 (Browne, Culligan 2017) corpora and their English Profile level distribution. The results show that approximately 25% of all words were identified as B1–C2 level, which implies that they might cause difficulties for beginners. The majority of vocabulary entries was shared by both corpora. In terms of English Profile level distribution, the differences between the two lists were insignificant, but NGSL–S was clearly the corpus with more A1–A2 and less B1–C2 words.

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