商务英语专业词汇门槛的设定——基于Range对2006—2015年《金融时报》和《财富》商务英语新闻的分析

Lexical Thresholds for the Business English Major:Range-aided Analysis on FT & Fortune Business Articles from 2006—2015

我国商务英语专业的词汇门槛尚未量化,语料库数据驱动的论证使设定这一具体语域的词汇门槛成为可能。在论述篇章视觉词汇、词汇覆盖率、词频、词汇门槛、商务新闻阅读理解之间的逻辑关系的基础上,对随样抽取的2006—2015年《金融时报》与《财富》商务新闻进行预处理,然后运用Range软件,对126 154个形符进行分析。实验结果表明:达到最低的95%与相对充裕的98%词汇覆盖率,词汇量分别约在4000词族与9000词族。建议把这两组数据设定为商务英语专业词汇门槛的参照,以期为商务英语专业在教学大纲撰写、教材编写、词表编列,以及测试与评估等提供词汇层面的学理依据。

There has not been statistical study on lexical thresholds for learners of Business English. Fortunately,corpus-based and data-driven experiments make it possible to quantify the vocabulary requirement for this domain-specific language learning. This paper explains the logics among sight vocabulary,lexical coverage,lexical threshold and reading comprehension. Aided by the Range Program,this research analyzes business news downloaded randomly from Financial Times and Fortune during the 2005—2016 period,with 126,154 tokens in total. The results of the experiment show that yielding 95% and 98% lexical coverage of business news,a minimal threshold of the most frequent 4000 word families and an optimal threshold of 9000 word families would be required. The findings have important implicationsforteachingbusiness vocabulary,designing a lexical syllabus,developing a word list,and selecting text materials. It is hoped that this study will add to the understanding of the vocabulary requirements for students majoring Business English.