This page describes the Secondary School Vocabulary Lists (SVL), giving information on what the SVL is, how it differs from other lists, how it was developed, as well as a complete list of words in the SVL.

What is the SVL?

The Secondary School Vocabulary Lists (SVL) is a series of lists of discipline-specific (i.e. technical) words for secondary school education, covering eight core subjects: Biology, Chemistry, Economics, English, Geology, History, Mathematics, and Physics. It was developed in 2018 by Clarence Green and James Lambert, working at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Although technical in nature, the list was devised using methods similar to those used to create the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) and the Medical Academic Vocabulary List (MAVL), which are lemma-based lists which consider measures such as range and dispersion along with word frequency. The SVL is designed to help students in secondary schools improve their disciplinary literacy.

The SVL does not present a single list. Rather, it comprises three different types of word list for eight different subjects, and therefore presents 24 lists in total. The three different types of word list are as follows:

• Lemma lists. These lists sort words by frequency, and contain only lemmas, i.e. words and inflected forms.
• Word family lists. These lists contain full word families, again sorted by frequency (total frequency of all words in the family).
• Collocation lists. These lists give words which are frequently associated with the SVL words, the most common 10 word associations for each.

The main lists are the lemma lists, which are similar in nature to the AVL and MAVL. This presents 880 words for Biology, 519 for Chemistry, 477 for Economics, 702 for Geography, 253 for Mathematics, 715 for History, 546 for Physics, and 686 for English.

The word family lists, which are broadly similar to the AWL and MAWL, differ from those lists in that frequency for all individual words in the family is given, allowing students (and teachers) to prioritise more frequent word forms.

The collocation lists present word associations, giving related concepts, synonyms, antonyms and hyponyms (i.e. words contained in other category words), rather than true lexical collocations. The authors found that some words only had a few collocates, while others had more than 100, and they therefore limited the number of collocates to 10 for each word. The authors recommend using these word associations in activities such as mind maps, word searches and spelling lists.

How does the SVL compare to other lists?

The SVL differs from other lists in several ways.

One difference, already noted above, is that the SVL comprises multiple lists for multiple subjects, rather than presenting a single list.

The SVL is also unique in that it draws on the methodology for creating word lists used by compilers of academic word lists for university study, and applies it to the creation of a list intended for secondary school students, who are therefore pre-university age.

The SVL contrasts with another set of technical lists for school-age students, the Middle School Vocabulary Lists created by Greene and Coxhead in 2015. Those lists, which covers five content areas (English, Health, Mathematics, Science, and Social Science/History), are intended for younger students, in grades 6 to 8 (approximately 11 to 14 years old). The Middle School Vocabulary Lists also differ from the SVL in that they were designed in a similar way to the AWL, using word families and excluding words from the GSL. The authors note the problems of excluding general words, in particular that important words with both general and subject-specific meaning may be overlooked. They give the example of set in mathematics, a general word which has a technical meaning, as shown by collocations such as empty set, universal set, and ordered set.

How was the SVL developed?

The SVL was developed from a corpus of secondary school textbooks, most published within five years of the creation of the list. The texts were taken from the Ministry of Education (Singapore) list of approved text books, all published in either Singapore or the UK, as well as A-level/O-level syllabi documents from the United Kingdom and Singapore. Some additional O-Level and A-level texts were sampled in order to reach the desired word count. In total, the corpus consisted of 206 textbooks, containing approximately 16.25 million words.

The main version of the SVL is lemma-based. As noted above, selection methods for words in the SVL were similar to those used to derive the AVL by Gardner and Davies and the MAVL by Lei and Liu. Specifically, the following six criteria were used. These were the only criteria; there was no subsequently vetting of the lists.

• Minimum frequency. Words needed to occur at least 28.57 times per million words.
• Range. Words needed to occur at least in at least 50% of the texts for the relevant discipline.
• Dispersion. Words needed to be evenly distributed throughout the corpora.
• Range Ratio. Words needed to occur with 20% of their minimum frequency in more than 50% of texts.
• Frequency Ratio/Keyness. Words needed to occur 3 times more often in the discipline than in the rest of the corpus.
• Major Part of Speech. Only nouns, verb, adjectives and adverb were included.

References

Secondary School Vocabulary Lists (SVL)