Corpus evidence for a discipline-specific phraseological approach to academic vocabulary
Keywords:
Corpus pattern analysis, English for Academic Purposes, language analysis, wordlist, specialist lexicography, Sketch EngineAbstract
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.Downloads
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