Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research (아시아태평양코퍼스연구)

Institute for Corpus Research (국립인천대학교 코퍼스연구소)
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Vocabulary Analyzer Based on CEFR-J Wordlist for Self-Reflection (VACSR) Version 2

  • Received : 2023.10.01
  • Accepted : 2023.12.10
  • Published : 2023.12.31
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Abstract

This paper presents a revised version of the vocabulary analyzer for self-reflection (VACSR), called VACSR v.2.0. The initial version of the VACSR automatically analyzes the occurrences and the level of vocabulary items in the transcribed texts, indicating the frequency, the unused vocabulary items, and those not belonging to either scale. However, it overlooked words with multiple parts of speech due to their identical headword representations. It also needed to provide more explanatory result tables from different corpora. VACSR v.2.0 overcomes the limitations of its predecessor. First, unlike VACSR v.1, VACSR v.2.0 distinguishes words that are different parts of speech by syntactic parsing using Stanza, an open-source Python library. It enables the categorization of the same lexical items with multiple parts of speech. Second, VACSR v.2.0 overcomes the limited clarity of VACSR v.1 by providing precise result output tables. The updated software compares the occurrence of vocabulary items included in classroom corpora for each level of the Common European Framework of Reference-Japan (CEFR-J) wordlist. A pilot study utilizing VACSR v.2.0 showed that, after converting two English classes taught by a preservice English teacher into corpora, the headwords used mostly corresponded to CEFR-J level A1. In practice, VACSR v.2.0 will promote users' reflection on their vocabulary usage and can be applied to teacher training.

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References

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