Abstract
In this article, we discuss the elaboration and use of vocabulary lists aimed for learners of French as a for-eign language. These lists are commonly based on corpora, which, in the ideal case, are representative, relevant and large. As for the English language, this kind of corpora has been available for a long time (e.g. the COCA and the BNC). Vocabulary lists, which are often used in learning contexts, have been based on these corpora. The situation is, however, less favorable when it comes to the French language, with fewer corpora meeting the mentioned criteria, and, thus, fewer possibilities to create vocabulary lists that are useful for learners. In this contribution, we present work that has been done in order to create a vocabulary list, Riksprovsordlistan, containing about 4,000 words and used at all Swedish universities. The discussion focuses on methodological challenges such as choice of counting unit – lemma vs. word family –, the role of frequency, thematic vocabulary, as well as characteristics of written vs. spoken corpora.
Publisher
Adam Mickiewicz University Poznan
Subject
Literature and Literary Theory,Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics
Reference28 articles.
1. Aston, G. & Burnard, L. (1998). The BNC handbook : exploring the British National Corpus with SARA. Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press.
2. Baudot, J. (1992). Les fréquences d'utilisation des mots en français écrit contemporain. Montréal : Presses de l'Université de Montréal.
3. Benigno, V., Grossmann, F. & Kraif, O. (2015). Les collocations fondamentales : une piste pour l'apprentissage lexical. Revue française de linguistique appliquée, 1, 81-96. DOI : https://doi.org/10.3917/rfla.201.0081
4. Campione, E., Véronis, J. & Deulofeu, J. (2005). The French corpus. In E. Cresti & M. Moneglia (eds.), C-ORAL-ROM : Integrated reference corpora for spoken romance languages (pp. 111-133). Amsterdam : John Benjamins. DOI : https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.15.05cam
5. Cobb, T. (2013). Frequency 2.0. Incorporating homoforms and multiword units in pedagogical frequency lists. In C. Bardel, C. Lindqvist & B. Laufer (ed.), L2 vocabulary acquisition, knowledge and use : new perspectives on assessment and corpus analysis (pp. 79-108). Amsterdam : Eurosla.