E.S.L. Graded
Wordlists
The word lists posted here were developed by Prof. K. H. Yang, and are distributed here on condition that they not be used commercially. Professor Yang's explanation of the development of these lists follows:
- In order to ... make things easier for both students and teachers, a team led by me compiled a 10,000-word list. We built our own corpus and worked out a series of criteria for defining the GRADE of each word. Our criteria are as follows: a) word frequency, b)meanings of the word, c)word formation ability, d)collocation, e)the need of teaching, and f)the special needs of Chinese students. The word "comma", for example, has low frequency of occurrence, but you need to use this word in your teaching. The word "party" has ten different meanings according to Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, for our students the first meaning should be " a political organization". In order to increase the coverage of our word list, we do not include many words which can be easily form through adding suffix or prefix. For example, our list includes the word "hard", but does not include the word "harden", we have the word "use", but haven't the word "reuse". We divide the ten thousand words into nine grades from Grade 0 to Grade 8. Grade 0--the first 1600 words for high school students, Grade 1 to Grade 4 -- 600 words each, Grade 5 and Grade 6-- 1200 words each, Grade 7 and Grade 8 -- 1800 words each. Although we published our word list in October, 1995, but we still work on it to make every possible improvement in the list-- deleting or adding some of the words, or changing the Grade attributes of some of the words.
- K.H.Yang <khyang@SUN20.HRBUCEA.EDU.CN>
- Professor, Department of Foreign Languages
- Harbin University of Architecture and Civil Engineering
- Harbin, China