English core word list for grade 4-6 Thai students

Abstract

The purposes of this research were : 1) to study and develop a list of high-frequency 2,000 core words from course books, O-Net, E-graded readers, Aesop's fables and cartoons for grades 4-6 students; and 2) to develop the Core Word List as a guideline for Thai students learning the English language. The instrument used was the Range program developed by Paul Nation and Alex Heatley (2002), the statistical procedures employed were frequency and percentage. A total of 352,289 running words from the initial corpus were lemmatized to extract all base forms. The word frequency and Thai students' environmant were used as criteria fir seleting 2,000 words in the construction of the English core word list. The first 2,000 word of this study were categorized according to the themes presented in Basic Education Curriculum for upper elementary students (2008); the words filled all 10 of these themes plus the researcher's collective theme including loan words. Three English language teaching experts confirmed the appropriateness of the words for the target age levels, and the 2,000 word categoty. Finally, the high frequency 2,000-word family list was compared with the General Service List (GSL) to analyze whether there was any overlap. the results indicated that the most frequently occurring 1,000 words attained a cumulative coverage of 83.60% and the 2,000 words attained a cumulative coverage of 91.20% in the corpus. The 2,000 words could fill of the themes, and the percentage of overlap is approximateiy 74.69 with the GSL. This study could serve as a reference source of the core vocanulary for the upper elementary grades in addition to the core content areas of learning foteign languages (The Basic Education Core Curriculum).