A comparison of the word lists of high school textbooks and GAT examination: a corpus-based study

The study aimed to compile an English High School Textbook Word List (HSTWL) and a GAT Examination Word List (GEWL) to be used as classroom materials that help high school students accumulate enough vocabulary to achieve success in fundamental English courses throughout the high school years as well as university admission tests. The High School Textbook Word List (HSTWL) was generated from three high school textbooks, and the GAT Examination Word List (GEWL) was generated from 15 GAT Examination papers administered to grade 12 students from 2009 to 2016. The words in the lists were selected based on Coxhead’s specialized occurrence, range, and frequency criteria. All the function words, pictures, graphs, charts, and captions were eliminated. The AntWordProfiler 1.5.1w program was used to analyze the data and counted the word frequency. The results revealed that the High School Textbook Word List (HSTWL) comprised 1,082 content words from 1,034 word families. Among the 1,034 families, 557 families belonged to words from the first 1,000 words of GSL, 242 families belonged to the second 1,000 words of GSL, 94 families covered the words from AWL, and 141 families did not belong to the GSL and AWL. The GAT Examination Word List (GEWL) consisted of 401 content words form 395 word families. There were 321 families belonging to the words from the first 1,000 words of GSL, 39 families belonging to the second 1,000 words of GSL, and 35 families covering the words from AWL. There were no words outside the GSL and AWL in the GEWL. The detailed investigation revealed that the selected high school textbooks provided the grade 12 students with a suitable and sufficient amount of vocabulary to achieve success on the GAT Examination. The lists can be used in English classes to help students prepare themselves for university admission tests.