The Soft Science Spoken Word List (SSWL) was developed for second language learners of soft-sciences at English-medium universities. It consists of the 1,964 most frequent and wide-ranging word-families in a 6.5 million word corpus of soft-science speech, which represents 12 subjects across two equally-sized sub-corpora. The list may allow learners to recognize 94%–97% of the words in academic speech of soft-sciences. A comparison of the SSWL with Dang's (2018) Hard Science Spoken Word List revealed that although the most frequent 3,000 words are important for comprehending academic speech of both soft- and hard-sciences, the value of these words in soft-sciences is greater than in hard-sciences. Details of the development and validation of the list are presented in Dang (2018):
Dang, T. N. Y. (2018a). The nature of vocabulary in academic speech of hard and soft-sciences. English for Specific Purposes, 51, 69-83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2018.03.004
