Learning vocabulary for university entrance exams: a word frequency study

This paper reports on a frequency analysis of the English vocabulary items that university-bound students in Japan are expected to master. The items are compared with the three frequency bands that current corpus-driven research shows to offer the widest range of coverage for the minimal amount of leaning investment. The comparison shows that students in Japan are being exposed to a large amount of vocabulary that is not in any of these three bands. Discussion of the problems with corpus-driven research and some of the pedagogical issues raised by the study is included