A High Frequency Word List for Political Sciences (original) (raw)
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The development of science academic word list
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Knowledge of specialized academic vocabulary is important for the academic success of EFL natural science students. Specialized words outside the General Service List (GSL) (West, 1953) and the Academic Word List (AWL) (Coxhead, 2000) are necessary for comprehending scientific text. The existing lists of words do not cover all sub-disciplines of natural science. The present study aims to explore the specialized academic words across 11 sub-disciplines of natural science. To identify the words, a corpus-based approach and an expert-judged approach were used. A 5.5-million-word corpus called the Science Academic Journal (SAJ) Corpus was created for this study. Applying the established word selection criteria, 513 word families were selected. The potential list was reviewed by a panel of experts in order to remove the overly-technical words from the list. The Science Academic Word List (SAWL) was established with 432 word families and provided 5.82% coverage of the running words in the...
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The article can be downloaded at https://so06.tci-thaijo.org/index.php/thoughts/article/view/258474\. A lack of knowledge of the political terminology used in news writing makes it difficult for L2 learners of English in the field of political science to keep themselves abreast of current worldwide political situations. This study built a semi-specialised word list for political science students interested in international political news. The Political News Corpus (PNC) was compiled between January 1, 2019 and June 30, 2021 from 6 news agencies: CNN, Politico, BBC, The Sun, ABC News, and 9News. The PNC contained 4,814 news items with a total size of 3,837,958 running words. Five criteria based on Laosrirattanachai and Ruangjaroon’s (2021) Filters (lexical frequency, lexical range, lexical profiling, lexical keyness, and expert consultation) were used to build the Semi-Technical Political News Word List (S-TPNWL). The AntWordProfiler programme (Anthony, 2014) and the Key-BNC programme (Graham, n.d.) were used to extract candidate words. The findings showed that the S-TPNWL contained 172 word families and covered approximately 5.28 per cent of the PNC. Political science students interested in international political news could utilise the S-TPNWL to increase their vocabulary range and understanding when reading political news. Also, teachers can benefit from the S-TPNWL by using it as a reference for creating teaching materials.
TEFLIN Journal - A publication on the teaching and learning of English
In this commentary, we begin with the discussion on a brief history of academic wordlists. Adopting a comparative perspective, then, the merits and demerits of the Academic Word List (AWL) (Coxhead, 2000) and its competing counterpart the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) (Gardner & Davies, 2014) are presented. We also explore whether the AWL can still be considered as “the best list” (Nation, 2001, p. 12) for improving academic words, or whether its counterpart is reasonably “the most current, accurate, and comprehensive list” (Gardner & Davies, 2014, p. 325). The comparison was made in terms of twelve aspects: corpus size, types of corpus texts, sources of corpus texts, text balance, disciplines included, counting unit, wordlist items, method for excluding highfrequency words, minimum frequency, method for excluding technical words, sequence of list items and lexical coverage. The comparison reveals that the AVL is far from complete and cannot replace the AWL. The results of the comp...
Towards the Development of an Academic Word List for Applied Linguistics
RELC Journal, 2013
Academic vocabulary, as the most challenging aspect of language learning in EAP and ESP contexts, has received much attention in the last few decades (e.g. Laufer, 1988; Sutarsyah, et al., 1994; Laufer and Nation, 1999; Coxhead, 2000; Nation, 2001a, 2001b; Wang et al., 2008; Martinez et al., 2009). The major attainments of these studies were identifying the academic vocabularies in the form of some wordlists called for all (Coxhead, 2000), or for some specific fields of study (Wang et al., 2008). Along with these studies and because of the paucity of studies in the field of Applied Linguistics, this study tries to establish an academic wordlist specific for the field of Applied Linguistics. Using frequency and range as the criteria for word form selection, this study identified 773 academic word types. A total of 573 (74.12%) academic words found in the corpus overlapped with the words in Coxhead’s AWL (2000). Therefore, Applied Linguistics teachers and students should pay special attention to this wordlist. From these findings it is concluded that (1) academic words play an important role in academic texts; therefore, acquisition of them seems to be essential for language learners and users; (2) material and syllabus designers and teachers’ direct attention to these words can lead to a better understanding of these words; hence, students’ development in their writing and reading.
Corpus evidence for a discipline-specific phraseological approach to academic vocabulary
Research in Corpus Linguistics, 2016
– This study examines the validity of the rationale underlying recent trends towards discipline-specific and phraseological approaches to vocabulary selection for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses. It examines the behaviour of Coxhead's (2000) New Academic Wordlist (AWL) using a 2,795,031 word corpus compiled from journal articles taken from the disciplines of History, Microbiology, and Management Studies. A two-stage method of analysis is employed. Firstly, coverage statistics for all AWL word families and their members are compared across the History, Microbiology, and Management Studies sub-corpora. This suggests difference in language use across disciplines. This difference is investigated further in a second stage of analysis which employs the Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2004) Word Sketch Difference tool and Corpus Pattern Analysis (Hanks 2004) techniques to examine the collocational behaviour of a sample of 57 AWL headwords across the three sub-corpora. The results demonstrate that a large number of the AWL words have discipline-specific meanings, and that these meanings are conditioned by the syntagmatic context of the AWL item.