Financial English Lexical Threshold Range-aided Analysis on Citibank ＆ Standard Chartered Bank’s Annual Reports 2011-2020

Abstract

Financial English, a key branch of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), has become increasingly important in the context of economic globalization. Its lexical threshold in China has not yet been quantified, but a corpus-driven approach makes it possible. After discussing the relationships among sight vocabulary, lexical coverage, word frequency, lexical threshold, and reading comprehension, this paper preprocesses Citibank and Standard Chartered Bank annual reports from 2011–2020 and analyzes 1,152,132 tokens using Range. The research indicates that to reach the minimum lexical coverage of 95%, learners should master approximately 4,000 word families. To achieve a more desirable lexical coverage of 98%, learners should not only acquire 4,565 word families from the BNC corpus but also an additional 274 key Financial English words beyond the BNC 15-level word list. The author suggests using these two datasets as benchmarks for the lexical threshold of Financial English learners, aiming to provide a lexical-level basis for vocabulary teaching, syllabus design, wordlist compilation, and textbook selection.