From a specialised corpus to classrooms for specific purposes: Creating the EU Word List

This paper reports a corpus-based analysis of the most frequent lexical items in English EU discourse. An EU word list was developed on the basis of the English EU Discourse Corpus containing slightly more than 1 million running words of official EU texts of 40 different genres that was created on the basis of the findings of a needs analysis questionnaire among EU professionals. The established EUWL comprises 513 word families, which account for 18.03% of the tokens in the EEUD Corpus. The evaluation of the EUWL found that established word list is EU-specific and it has a high text coverage in EU texts. The results of the analysis established that the EUWL can serve as a firm basis for course and materials design for English for the EU language programmes.