An analysis of lexical text coverage in contemporary German”. Presentation given at the Corpus Linguistics 2003 conference

One of the many practical applications of corpus studies is the generation of word frequency information, which can provide useful data to language teaching professionals as well as lexicographers. It makes sense that for the teaching of vocabulary in a second language, lexical frequency should play a significant role in the selection of vocabulary to be included in pedagogical materials. Likewise, a dictionary intended for language learning should be based at least in part on words that occur most frequently in the language being studied. As Aston has stated, "Insofar as frequency data from corpora can indicate whether a particular feature is likely to be worth learning, this fact makes it relevant to teachers and learners as well as to syllabus and material designers " (P. 8). In this arena of corpus-based frequency studies for pedagogical applications, Nation and others have been successful in determining what has come to be known as "text coverage", or the relationship between a given number of high frequency words in a text and the percentage of the text that these words account for. As Nation points out, "... studies of native speakers ' vocabulary growth see all words as being of equal value to the learner. Frequency based studies show very strikingly that this is not so, and that some words are more useful than others " (P. 9). He goes on to show that in a specific text of English fiction the most frequent 1000 words in the text accounted for 82.3 % of the total text. The second 1000 most frequen