Meaning form and usage are central themes within this project. The interaction of meaning, form and usage were key guides to selection. The general selection criteria for words on the EWL are as follows:
Words within the top 1,000 occurrences were selected based on a corpus compiled from engineering textbooks that our students have to read in their first year of studies.
Lexical-grammatical interest is a theme that runs throughout this project. For example, a seemingly uninteresting word such as used was included in the list because its lexical-grammatical environment can pose a challenge to elementary and low intermediate learners. Moreover, the usage of used in the engineering textbooks is different from its usage in general English. This is something that needs to be pointed out to students to facilitate reading comprehension.
Words that had individual meaning were selected, too. Therefore, propositions were normally excluded from the list; however, prepositions and how they affect their lexical-grammatical environment in the form of collocations, word forms, and colligations are examined in exercises in CEEM.
Different forms of the frequently occurring word were included in the list if they fell within the top 8,000 words or provided some point of interest based on the other criteria. Our students often have difficulty recognizing that words such as create/creating/creation/creates/created are all related. In addition, it was noticed that different forms of a word may collocate with different words or the usage was somewhat different. This was deemed important since meaning, form and usage are central themes of this project.