The Lexical Frequency Profile (Laufer & Nation, 1995) can be defined as the percentage of words in a text belonging to different frequency levels (usually established in bands of 1,000 words each). It is obtained by comparing the given text with a number of frequency lists (or bands) to obtain, as a result, the percentage of words that are included in each list as well as the percentage of words which are outside the lists.

ADELEX ANALYSER establishes the Lexical Profile of written texts in English on the basis of information contained in a 7,000-word frequency list drawn from the British National Corpus, the Bank of English and the Longman Corpus Network databases.

 

The analysis divides this list into 7 bands:

 

• Band 1: from word no. 1 to word no. 1,000
• Band 2: from word no. 1,001 to word no. 2,000
• Band 3: from word no. 2,001 to word no. 3,000
• Band 4: from word no. 3,001 to word no. 4,000
• Band 5: from word no. 4,001 to word no. 5,000
• Band 6: from word no. 5,001 to word no. 6,000
• Band 7: from word no. 6,001 to word no. 7,000

 

Parameters for the interpretation of results:

Thus, if we take on board that a learner needs to understand at least 95% of the words in a text to achieve general reading comprehension (Laufer, 1997), this analysis can determine whether the text is adequate for the intended reader, given his/her lexical competence. Generally speaking, and starting from the assumption that the 2,000 most frequent words of the language are so essential "that anything that teachers and learners can do to make sure they are learned is worth doing" (Nation, 2001: 16), we can establish the following parameters for the interpretation of results:

• If 95% of words in a given text belong to the list of the 2,000 high-frequency words of the language, we consider it as a text of low difficulty (e.g. for secondary school students).
• When 95% of words in a text is among the first 5,000 words we then estimate it as a reading of medium difficulty (e.g. for university students of English in their first years).
• If more than 5% words of a text have a frequency under the level of 5,000 it is regarded as a difficult text (e.g. for use with highly advanced learners).