Abstract
The present study analyzed the vocabulary profile of the News on the Web (NOW) corpus, which contained 12 billion words from online newspapers and magazines in 20 countries to determine the vocabulary knowledge needed to reasonably understand online newspaper and magazine articles. The results showed that, in general, knowledge of the most frequent 4,000 word families in the British National Corpus/Corpus of Contemporary American English (BNC/COCA) wordlist plus proper nouns, marginal words, transparent compounds and acronyms was necessary to gain 95% coverage for the NOW corpus. However, when it came to the 98% coverage, online newspaper and magazine articles from different countries had relatively distinct lexical demands. In-depth analyses were carried out and the findings offered comprehensive insights into the issue. Implications for teaching and learning were also provided.
Highlights
Newspapers have been a crucial of part people’s lives, with 52–85% of the people in different countries reading news more than once a day (Cabrera, 2020)
The most frequent 1,000 word families in the British National Corpus (BNC)/Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) wordlist accounted for the greatest proportion of tokens, 72.48%
Another worth noting detail was the proportion of proper nouns, marginal words, transparent compounds and acronyms in the corpus
Summary
Newspapers have been a crucial of part people’s lives, with 52–85% of the people in different countries reading news more than once a day (Cabrera, 2020). In a recent research conducted on American news habit by Shearer (2021), 86% of United States adults got their news from a digital device (e.g., smartphone, computer, or tablet). These figures were significantly higher than television (68%), radio (50%) and print publications (32%) (Shearer, 2021). Compared to print newspapers or magazines, online publications are more accessible, could be read from anywhere and are supported by state-of-the-art technology which offers better reading experience. Most, if not all, online newspapers are eco- and reader-friendly, that is, they are free to read and do not harm any tree
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