Development of a General Academic Written Chinese Word List: A Corpus-Based Approach

Abstract This study developed the General Academic Written Chinese Word List (GAWCWL) as a supplementary vocabulary resource for Chinese for Academic Purposes (CAP). A 9.95-million-token corpus was compiled through stratified random sampling of texts published between 2012 and 2022 across ten disciplines and four written academic text types. Word selection used a five-dimensional procedure: Jieba segmentation (candidate extraction), full exclusion of Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK) Levels 1–6 words, frequency and range thresholds, and Discipline Measurement (DM). The resulting list contained 487 entries and accounted for 8.58% of tokens in the development corpus, compared with 7.66% for the Chinese Academic Vocabulary List and 4.86% for the General Academic Chinese Vocabulary List after HSK vocabulary was excluded from all three lists. Across the four text types, GAWCWL coverage ranged from 7.22% to 9.56%, with a coefficient of variation of 12.2%. In supplementary external evaluation, the GAWCWL covered 8.79% of tokens in an independent corpus of aquatic science journal articles and 2.74% in a science-fiction corpus, indicating higher coverage in the academic than in the non-academic texts examined. The GAWCWL provides a corpus-informed reference for vocabulary support beyond the specified HSK baseline in written academic Chinese. Its broader applicability and instructional effectiveness require further investigation.