The source of target vocabulary
The LVLT items are from Nation’s (2012) British National Corpus (BNC) / Corpus of
Contemporary American English (COCA) word lists. The first and second 1000-word
family lists of the BNC/COCA were derived from a specially designed 10 million token
corpus that includes 6 million tokens from spoken British and American English. The
corpus was created to provide a set of high frequency word lists suitable for teaching and
course design (Nation, 2012). The lists for the third 1000-word family and above were
created using BNC/COCA rankings after removing the word families from the first 2000
words of the BNC/COCA. The BNC/COCA word lists provide a strong basis for the
LVLT, as they are representative of both British and North American varieties of English
and are partly based on a spoken corpus. As Webb and Sasao (2013) stated, ‘the new
BNC/COCA lists should be representative of current English, and provide a far better
indication of the vocabulary being used by native speakers today than the lists used for
the creation of the earlier versions of the VLT’ (p. 267).