Developing and Validating an Academic Vocabulary List in Chinese

Abstract

The research on academic vocabulary lists has been a topic of interest for decades, as a good command of academic words may in part define a learner's academic performance. With China's increasing international impact over the past decades, more learners have chosen to learn Chinese as their foreign language. In response, a few word lists of general Chinese have been developed, while no vocabulary list of academic Chinese is available. In this study, we developed the Academic Vocabulary List in Chinese (AVLC) based on our home-made large-scale dataset of academic Chinese. The words to be included in our list were carefully selected with strict criteria regarding frequency, range, dispersion, and discipline measures. Our AVLC list contains 594 words, which explain 12.28% of the corpus data. In addition, their coverage in academic texts is much higher than that in non-academic texts, such as news and literary works, which shows that the AVLC includes words that are particularly used in academic texts. The AVLC is, to our knowledge, the first vocabulary list of academic Chinese. Pedagogical implications and directions for future research are also discussed in the study.

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