High-frequency words in academic spoken English: Corpora and learners

EAP teachers and course designers usually assume that learners have already mastered the most frequent words of general language before entering their courses. Therefore, they focus on words that are outside high-frequency vocabulary but common in academic written English. This fixed vocabulary benchmark is questionable given EAP learners’ varied language proficiency. A good understanding of academic spoken English is certainly important for students’ academic success. Concentrating only on academic written vocabulary for comprehending academic spoken English may therefore be problematic. No attempts have been made to address these issues in a single study. This study compared the occurrences of high-frequency words in academic spoken and written English. It also tested EAP learners’ receptive knowledge of these words. Results showed that high-frequency words play a very important part in academic spoken English, but most participants failed to master them receptively. Suggestions for enhancing EAP learners’ knowledge of high-frequency words are provided.