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Volume 49
Professional Teachers' Articles
January 2011
Article 2

Article Title
Creating a Corpus-Based Daily Life Vocabulary for TEYL

Authors
Kiyomi CHUJO
College of Industrial Technology, Nihon University, Japan.

Kathryn OGHIGIAN
Center for English Language Education for Science and Engineering, Waseda University.

Masao UTIYAMA
National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan.

Chikako NISHIGAKI
Faculty of Education at Chiba University in Japan.

Bio Data:
Kiyomi Chujo is an associate professor at the College of Industrial Technology, Nihon University, Japan. She completed her Ph.D. on vocabulary selection for English education at Chiba University, Japan in 1991. Her current research interests are vocabulary learning and the pedagogical applications of corpus linguistics such as data-driven learning.

Kathryn Oghigian teaches technical writing and academic reading at the Center for English Language Education for Science and Engineering, Waseda University. She earned her MA degree from the University of British Columbia in Modern Language Education in 1997, and her interests are focused on corpus-based applications to language acquisition.

Masao Utiyama is a senior researcher of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan. His main research field is natural language processing. He completed his doctoral dissertation at the University of Tsukuba in 1997. His current research interests are exploring models of natural languages and their practical applications.

Chikako Nishigaki is a professor in the Faculty of Education at Chiba University in Japan. She completed her doctoral dissertation at Chiba University in 1992. She teaches applied linguistics to undergraduate and graduate students and has published extensively on EFL vocabulary and listening.

Abstract
The purpose of this study has been to create a list of children’s everyday vocabulary in English which will provide a foundation for daily life vocabulary for Japanese elementary school students and which will complement and augment existing English vocabulary currently taught in Japanese junior and senior high schools. Vocabulary words were taken from the CHILDES spoken corpus and picture dictionaries, and were ranked statistically with an outstanding-ness score based on a log likelihood keyword analysis and a selection probability score based on an adapted form of range. It was found that the identified words are at the appropriate grade level (grades 1 to 3), that the semantic content areas are grade-appropriate and complement the semantic categories of junior and senior high school (JSH) vocabulary, and that this vocabulary supplements JSH vocabulary in text coverage over 18 activities.

Keywords: daily life vocabulary, TEYL, picture dictionary, corpus, CHILDES

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