What is the BNL frequency scheme?

The BNL lists have been termed a 'a facelifted GSL' (Eldridge 2008, "No, there isn't an 'academic vocabulary', but...", TESOL Quarterly, 42(1): 111).

Here is a recent description: Critics of the AWL concept have recently proposed a new single list for academic settings - the Billuroglu–Neufeld List (BNL; Neufeld and Billuroglu 2005; Hancioglu et al. 2008). In short, the BNL is an amalgam of several different lists, summarized here, based on an article by Hancioglu et al. (2008: 466):

1. The GSL word families
2. The AWL word families
3. The first 2,000 words of the Brown Corpus
4. The first 5,000 words of the BNC (presumably lemmas, but unclear)
5. The 1995 Bauman revision of the GSL
6. The Longman Wordwise commonly used words
7. The Longman Defining Vocabulary

"Key to the BNL concept is that the combining and filtering of several established lists should result in a new general list that is less prone to the problems associated with any of the lists individually, and that nearly all of the AWL words are simply 'absorbed' (p. 466) into the new list, essentially eliminating any need to distinguish between a GSL and an AWL."

(This account from Gardener & Davies, "A new academic vocabulary list," Applied Linguistics, Aug 2013.)

< Acknowledgments of the BNL concept > Contact BNL's creators: lexitronics@gmail.com