Health literacy and language teaching: data-based host language lexicons

Abstract

Using a corpus-based approach, this paper presents methods and results for assessing, extracting, and describing the core vocabulary relevant to healthcare access among migrant populations. The aim is to bridge the gap between the basic information conveyed to people arriving in Portugal and the materials as well as other lexicographic resources used in language teaching. The work includes identifying available resources and/or sources for compiling the relevant dataset for healthcare access; selecting available tools for corpus inquiry; testing and comparing results from different functionalities and different lexical statistics measures available in the tools; manual filtering of the data; and analyzing the results and the extracted lexicon. The obtained results reflect the organization of the extracted lexicon in subdomains, the organization of the items within each subdomain, the relationship with common vocabulary, and the extraction of authentic examples from the corpus.