Several thousand students took part in these tests in the ordinary Swedish state School. From 1975 the tests were also carried out at several Centres of Adult Education. It is interesting to note that the acquisition of vocabulary is faster among students with higher marks. See diagram . The result of this investigation was that in the TEFL corpus there was a predominance of words denoting concrete objects and physical actions.
Words denoting abstractions and mental processes are under-represented.
Magnus Ljung says in his concluding remarks that there is reason to be critical of the TEFL texts on at least two major counts, i.e. the low general level of lexical sophistication and the absence of a clear increase in vocabulary difficulty as we move from the early to the later schools years. The words which are missing or under-represented in the TEFL texts are not, on the whole, particularly rare or abstruse. In 1987 I started to work on the creation of a lemmatised word list of the B ham Corpus. At the time this was one of the most recent and extensive corpora available. It was compiled by the staff at the University of Birmingham.