JACET 8000 and Asia TEFL Vocabulary Initiative

Indigenization of English in many Asian ESL countries and partial learning of English in EFL countries are two major hindrances to Asian Englishes today. Although Englishes are growing day by day, we have not had any common ground on which we can compare our English with other English varieties. The authors of this article were organizing members of the Committee of Revising the JACET List of Basic Words. (JACET stands for the Japan Association of College English Teachers.) In this article they claim that their experiences of compiling the JACET word list are applicable to make word lists for Asian English users and learners, which become their vocabulary base of comparison, and the basis of the Asia TEFL Vocabulary Initiative. 1. What is the JACET 8000? In 2003, the Committee of Revising the JACET List of Basic Words published "the JACET List of 8000 Basic Words" (thereafter JACET 8000). The JACET 8000 is a radically new word list designed for all English learners in Japan. This list is based on two kinds of corpora: the British National Corpus and the JACET 8000 Subcorpus. Although the BNC consists of 100 million words, most of them are taken from several-decades-old British English texts, and English texts for learners are hardly included. Therefore, the committee has compiled the Subcorpus of approximately six million words to make up the BNC. Its data comes from the recent American newspapers, magazines, and scripts of TV program or cinema, and also from children‟s literature, junior or senior high school English textbooks, and various English tests conducted in Japan. The content of Subcorpus is shown below: Table 1. The Content of JACET 8000 Subcorpus Genre Content American / British Spoken/Written Size (mil. words) Mass media Newspapers and Magazines A/B W 1 Script of TV Programs A/B S 1 Cinema Cinema Script mainly A S 1.3 Educational Junior or Senior High School Textbooks mainly A mainly W 0.8 ESP Exams (University Entrance Examination Test, STEP, TOEFL, TOEIC) mainly A W 0.2 Scientific Articles mainly A W 0.3 Literature Children Literature mainly B W 1.2