TOWARDS DESCRIPTION OF CORE ENGLISH NOUNS: AN EFL LEARNER PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

Vocabulary plays a significant role in the learning of English as a foreign language (EFL). According to Cameron (2001), it is often considered as a key indicator in foreign language curriculum and its deficiency impedes successful communication in the target language. Schmitt (2000: 55) asserts that “lexical knowledge is central to communicative competence and to the acquisition of a second language”. Nouns constitute a considerable bulk of English vocabulary. Rather they are the bones of the English language and are the main semantic carrier in spoken and written discourse. As nouns dominate the bulk of English lexicon, their role becomes all the more potential. The undertaken research is a systematic effort in this regard to work out a list of highly frequent list of English nouns for the EFL learners. The corpus used for the research is The English Web Corpus (enTenTen) that has been compiled by collecting text from the internet. Sketch Engine, a corpus tool, has been used to process corpus data and to retrieve word list of English frequent nouns. The retrieved list of core English nouns is supposed to be useful for English language teachers, learners, lexicographers, lexicologists and grammarians.