A CORPUS-BASED INVESTIGATION INTO LEXICAL COVERAGE AND AWL OCCURRENCE IN THE ENGLISH TEST OF VIETNAM'S NATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION EXAMINATION

DOI: 10.18173/2354-1075.2023-0080

Tóm tắt

This corpus-based study examines all codes of the English papers of Vietnam's National High School Graduation Examination (from 2019 to 2022) regarding lexical coverage as well as academic words appearing in the texts. With the utilization of the Vocabprofile program available on https://www.lextutor.ca/ and two corpora, the Academic Word List (AWL) and BNC-COCA-25K, the results of the investigation revealed that exam-takers were generally required to master the first 3000-word families for 95% comprehension and roughly the first 5000-word families for the rate of 98%, which could be a challenge for them. Another concern is the percentage of AWL items that appeared in these papers was sharply lower than the average in academic contexts. The results not only offer teachers and students insights into the required language input but also emphasize the significance of the number of academic words for comprehension. Additionally, our study indicates that the lexical demands across different examination years appear to be consistent.