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Record W4411221323 · doi:10.1017/s0261444825000059

Applications of word lists in second language learning and teaching

2025· article· en· W4411221323 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueLanguage Teaching · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicSecond Language Acquisition and Learning
Canadian institutionsWestern University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsLinguisticsComputer scienceWord learningWord (group theory)PsychologyLanguage acquisitionNatural language processingMathematics educationVocabularyPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Although word lists have generated a great deal of attention from researchers, there has been no comprehensive review of the applications of word lists in second language learning and teaching. This article reviews the development, validation, and applications of 50 word list studies that were published and discussed in major international peer-reviewed Applied Linguistics and TESOL journals from 2013 to 2023. It shows that the methodology of word list development and validation has become more sophisticated and word list developers can see many potential applications of their lists in research and pedagogy. However, most applications of recently developed word lists have been restricted to the BNC/COCA lists developed by Paul Nation, and little is known about the degree to which most word lists have been used in pedagogical contexts. Our review indicates several directions for future research on word lists, including exploring the impact of published lists on pedagogy, replicating word list studies for learners in underrepresented contexts, and developing sustainable, low-cost methods of developing word lists to allow teachers and learners to create lists serving their own needs.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.708
Threshold uncertainty score0.994

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0070.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.005
GPT teacher head0.330
Teacher spread0.325 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it