A corpus-based gradation of English affixes: With reference to Elementary School English textbooks

초록

We are concerned with the question of how to define a lexical unit for the purposes of basic word lists. The basic vocabulary list of the 2015 Revised National Curriculum of English took word families as lexical units literally, so that a headword and all of its inflectional and derivative forms count as one single word in the list. This approach is, however, not attainable simply because learners of English as a foreign language usually know only a (very) limited number of members of a word family. Given that vocabulary size, depth (in particular, knowledge of word derivation) and fluency are interrelated, the ideal lexical unit should be a word family that allows a much more restricted set of derivatives than proposed in Bauer and Nation (1993). As a first step to make the basic vocabulary list incorporating this idea, we investigated the use of derivational forms in five Elementary English textbooks that are currently used, and found that five suffixes -er, -y, -ful, -th and -an should be the most important ones to consider for EFL learners at Korea elementary schools. We concluded the work with some implications of the findings. © 2021 KASELL All rights reserved.

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