Academic Vocabulary in Psychology Research Articles: A Corpus-Based Study

Y

21

Academic Language; Word Lists; Computational Linguistics; Psychology; Research Reports; Language Usage; Teaching Methods; Educational Resources; Vocabulary Development; English for Academic Purposes; Second Language Learning; Second Language Instruction

2395-9908

The current corpus-based study investigated the lexical profile of psychology research articles based on General Service List (GSL) (West, 1953) and Academic Word List (AWL) (Coxhead, 2000). To this end, a corpus of 8,500 psychology research articles with around 74 million words was analyzed. The results showed that the AWL accounted for 13.12% of the tokens in the corpus. Further computer analysis of the corpus revealed that 472 out of 570 word families in the AWL have been used frequently in psychology research articles. The study also identified 693 word types outside the GSL and the AWL which occurred frequently in the corpus and accounted for 6.1% of the tokens. Finally, the findings of this study revealed that 1,537 high frequent AWL and non-GSL/AWL word types (rather than word families) provided around 17.91% coverage of the corpus, while the high ranking 570 word types in this list accounted for about 13.44% of the corpus which is higher than the coverage of the 570 AWL word families combined (with about 3000 types). Based on these findings, the study concluded that although the AWL is a valuable pedagogical resource for teaching academic vocabulary, there is a need to develop more restricted and discipline specific word lists to cater for the needs of students in different subject areas. The study also highlights the significance of these findings.

As Provided

2021

EJ1310955