The word profile of a Global Online Course for English language teachers: A corpus-based research project

Abstract

Providing useful reference materials for online course participants is an important aspect for online courses. To aid a course designed to provide professional development to English language teachers from around the world, this corpus-based study investigated the frequency and coverage of Academic Word List (Coxhead, 1998), General Service List (GSL) first 1000 words (1K), and GSL second 1000 words (2K) lists. Gathering course materials and participant discussion board posts into two corpora for this study, frequency and coverage of the three base lists were calculated using AntWordProfiler and AntConc, resulting in a coverage of 9.56 % for AWL words and over 80% coverage for the two GSL lists combined in the first corpus. The high percentage of off-list words (9.75%) in the first corpus and low percentage of AWL words in the second corpus (5.23%) motivated the creation of a new word list that contains the most frequently used words outside of the AWL, GSL 1K, and GSL 2K words from the first corpus to supplement future course participants with technical words that are required to successfully complete the course.