The Journal of Teaching English for Specific and Academic Purposes (original) (raw)
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Corpus-Based Vocabulary Learning in Technical English
2021
One of the main challenges posed in front of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) teachers in developing syllabi at higher education level is the choice of vocabulary to be taught. This issue is particularly prominent in technical English, which apart from being abundant in nouns, requires students to learn the other highly frequent noun-based structures such as multi-word lexical units (MWLUs). Learning how to cope with these condensed structures both in reading and writing, will make the students competent and self-confident ESP users. The choice of lexical items is usually left to teachers’ intuition. This paper intends to assist teachers in avoiding addressing the issue by making such intuitive decisions, offering the model of incorporating the corpus-based vocabulary findings into their ESP syllabi instead. Thus, the research questions addressed in this paper are: Can a computer software extract all the nouns, MWLUs and multi-noun lexical units (MNLUs) with 100% certainty? What ...
Lexical Features of Engineering English vs. General English
GEMA Online® Journal of Language Studies, 2017
The knowledge on the features of the English varieties is essential to understand the differences and similarities of the varieties for second language teaching and learning, either for general proficiency (EGP) or English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classes. This paper demonstrates a corpus-based comparison of the lexical features between an ESP variety (Engineering English) and a General English (GE). Two corpora are used in the study; the Engineering English Corpus (EEC) acts as the representation of the specialized language, and the British National Corpus (BNC) as the General English (GE). The analyses are conducted by employing the WordList functions of a linguistic software-Wordsmith. Discussions on the differences (or similarities) of these two corpora include general statistics, text coverage and vocabulary size. The empirical findings in this study highlight the general lexical features of both corpora. The analyses verify that the Engineering English has less varied vocabulary, but higher text coverage than the GE; in other words, most of the words are used repeatedly throughout the EEC. Thus, this study further emphasizes the importance of corpus-based lexical investigations in providing empirical evidences for language description.
Development of a corpus of Malaysian KBSM engineering texts and related word list
2015
Engineering students are required to read Engineering textbooks which are specialized in nature, containing significant amount of Engineering vocabulary and terminology. There is a language need for better comprehension of Engineering concepts and this can be done by focusing on the frequent and essential Engineering vocabulary required. In addition, since most English Language Teaching (ELT) teachers are non-specialists in the field of Engineering, they can be unguided when it comes to the teaching of required Engineering vocabulary in a classroom. Furthermore, the core problem concerning the Malaysian textbooks is that the textbooks produced are not based on any essential word lists or corpora in the syllabus. Thus, evaluating and analyzing the specialised textbooks is a substantial way to highlight the importance of lexical components for the Engineering students to initiate them into their discourse community and for ELT teachers who teach English for Specific Purposes (ESP) cou...
8-A Corpus-based Comparative Study of Semi-technical and Technical Vocabulary-new
This study is a corpus-based lexical study that is aimed at comparing semi-technical vocabulary and technical vocabulary to address the specific needs of undergraduates majoring in information engineering in mainland China through the study of bilingual specialized courses. A 1,024,882word corpus of Information Engineering English Corpus (IEEC) was built using texts from ten specialized courses. Semi-technical and technical vocabulary items were profiled using West's (1953) General Service List and Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List. A quantitative analysis was carried out to find the optimal frequency threshold for high-frequency academic/semitechnical and technical vocabulary specific to the discipline of Information Engineering. As a result, 248 semi-technical and 166 technical word families were extracted covering 9.16% and 4.95% of the total tokens of the corpus. The pilot study further explored the selected vocabulary of varying specificity in terms of their lexical features as well as collocations and found that there is a continuum rather than distinct boundaries between the GSL, discipline-specific academic and technical words when they are manipulated to serve specific purposes.
The present study has tried to investigate the vocabulary content of the General English textbook of Payame Noor University one of the state universities in Iran. This study has used a computer program called vocabprofile (VP) which was invented by . The lexicon of the book was compared against three different word lists including: The first 1,000 most frequent words in General English (GE), the second 1,000 most frequent words in GE and the Academic Word List (AWL). The results showed that most of the vocabulary in this textbook was among the first 1,000 most frequent words in General English and the frequency and repetition of words were not sufficient for comprehensive learning of the vocabulary presented. It was concluded that the type and amount of vocabulary presented was not appropriate for the level of the students.
Lidil Revue de linguistique et de didactique des langues
Lidil, 2018
This study highlights the problem of the lack of German specialized corpora for German for specific purposes (GSP) courses for engineering students and describes a project aiming at the development of such a corpus, the Kod.ING corpus. The authors show the relevance of the Kod.ING corpus to meet the needs of Master’s degree engineering students studying German at St. Petersburg Polytechnic University and whose level of the German language competence is quite low. At the preliminary stage of the pedagogical experiment, nine compound nouns and eight lexical bundles were selected from the Kod.ING corpus to help students deal with their problematic areas in German. These were taught to students through hands-off and hands-on DDL activities during the pedagogical experiment. The immediate and delayed post-tests proved the efficiency of short DDL interventions for the target vocabulary acquisition and the survey revealed a particular interest of students for hands-on activities with the Russian National Corpus (RNC). In conclusion, further research and pedagogical applications are suggested.
Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación, 2021
Considering the importance of adequate understanding of instruction books and manuals on board vessels all over the world, as well as the challenges it imposes to the English language teachers and course designers, this paper aims to answer important research questions in relation to the quantity and type of vocabulary required for their adequate reading comprehension. In this study we use the method of Lexical Frequency Profiling and the software developed by Anthony Laurence – AntWordProfiler 1.4.0w. The corpus is comprised of 1,769,821 running words obtained from instruction books and manuals of various ship and machinery types. The results of this study point to the high technicality and lexical demand of the corpus, which calls for a highly technical English courses’ design and further research in marine engineering (English) vocabulary. Additionally, the research findings point to the need of creating a marine engineering-specific word list.
Corpus Linguistics and Vocabulary: A Commentary on Four Studies
Vocabulary Learning and Instruction, 2017
Tools and methods developed in the field of corpus linguistics play an often understated but important role in much of vocabulary research. This article offers a commentary on four vocabulary studies that explicitly reference the use of corpus linguistics in the development of new vocabulary resources, tools, and concepts. First, the article categorizes corpus linguistics research into two distinct areas and then positions the four studies in these areas. Next, the article summarizes the results of the four studies, before making suggestions for strengthening the works from the perspective of mainstream corpus linguistics research. The article concludes with a general comment on the value of the studies as they relate to corpus linguistics and vocabulary research in general.