How and Why the Graduate Student Classified English Word Lists

We've been considering the focal points for the vocabulary collecting, range, principle and classification of all these issues when we were compiling these lists for graduate students,

  1. The Range of Collecting Vocabulary.
    Robert Lado, the well-known linguist said: "In the environment of foreign language, college students should be required to successfully complete at least 10,000 reading vocabulary words of the foreign language. It is necessary and vital for them. Paul Nation, a New Zealand University Professor, also thinks that students at the great learning period, should know at least from 5,000 to 10,000 vocabulary words. According to these standpoints, we have collected around 7,000 vocabulary words in these lists.

  2. The Range and Principle of collecting vocabulary.
    1. Range: We collected by single words, not by phrases nor grammar with changing form. We also did not include names of people or places, or any proper nouns.
    2. Principle: We didn't collect any of the compound words. Yet, we did collect small amounts of the new words that transform into compound words that can become a new word or new meaning.
  3. The principle of classified vocabulary lists.
    These lists generally were put together according to the frequency of an individual word by the classification standard.
  4. Reference for collecting vocabulary.
    The reference we have used as a list includes dictionaries, vocabulary books, vocabulary charts, some vocabulary exercises and some teaching material which relate to what we needed.
  5. The process for collecting vocabulary.
    We used Thorndike as our main reference and then compared them to Longman Lexicon of Contemporary English. The according to the frequency of all these vocabulary and how often they appear in the reference, we made a final sieving and chose these vocabulary words.
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