More on concordancing the ELP Reader

It has been interesting to look at the vocabulary from the ELP Reader as it is presented in the concordancing program I mentioned in my last post. Did you know that the Reader has a total word count of 115,339 of which there are 11,739 distinct words/word forms. Some words appear very frequently such as "the" which occurs 6,528 times. On the other hand, there are 5,474 words which only appear once. Some of these are in fact quite uncommon words such as Lamarkian, torosus, chronemics, eustress, vasectomized, plasmodia, flivver and benumbed (which it is easy to become after looking at these kinds of words!) Some of the once-only words were surprizing though, as I would expect them to be more common: dual, dry, fade, nobody, angry, qualification and judgement.

It may be interesting to identify a particular subset of ELP Reader vocabulary that occurs within a range of frequency between say 25 and 50, and focus instruction on those words since we could predict that students would have a good chance of encountering them as they read through the Reader, and would thus have those items somewhat naturally reinforced.

It would also be interesting to see how the ELP Reader reflects the more general Academic Word List.