General Service List of Conversational English

Most general service lists are based on written data (Brezina & Gablasova, 2015), overlooking the inherently unique features of conversations. The General Service List of Conversational English addresses this gap by presenting a general service list of conversational British English, based on the spoken British National Corpus 2014. After compilation, the data has been sifted manually to eliminate stopwords, e.g., swear words and months. The aims of the list are threefold: 1) identifying and describing the core lexis of conversations; 2) identifying the heavy-duty vocabulary necessary for full comprehension; and 3) identifying the relation between the coverage of the core lexical and the core conversational vocabulary. The list suggests that conversational English uses a high degree of recycling of core vocabulary, which is simple in structure and operates at the phatic level of interaction. These findings are particularly interesting for EFL materials design and the teaching of conversational English, enhancing the authenticity of conversations in the EFL classroom. The version of the list on this site contains the heavy-duty vocabulary, i.e. the K2 words of conversational English, divided into four bands: K0.5, K1.0, K1.5 and K2.0.