Developing a Russian frequency core vocabulary list for foreign children based on corpus data

Abstract

The article is devoted to the problem of creating a list of the most common Russian words for
primary school students learning Russian as a foreign language. The problem of minimizing and
optimizing the language input is extremely important in foreign language acquisition studies.
Lists of the most commonly used and relevant vocabulary can solve this problem by providing
information about lexical units that this group of students is most likely to encounter. At the
moment there is a lack of up-to-date lexical lists for an audience of primary school age who study
Russian as a foreign language. This article aims to fill this gap. The proposed vocabulary lists are compiled by combining information about the frequency of a word
from several relevant sources: the corpus of children's literature,
and the corpus of textbooks of Russian as a native language and as
a foreign language. To calculate an aggregated value of a word from
these sources, three types of calculations were made: the average
value of ipm, the average value of the Zipf rank, and the author's
formula, which takes into account, in addition to frequency, the
factor of even distribution of the word over diff erent segments of
the corpora. The quality of the resulting lists has been confirmed
by the text coverage of the collection of target text samples: fiction
for children, children's periodicals, and cartoon transcripts. The
developed list of the most commonly used words can be used by
authors and editors of educational content.

Keywords:

vocabulary selection, vocabulary list, Russian as a foreign language, word frequency, corpus-based language teaching