Towards the development of an introductory academic word list
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Date
2019
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University Of Oum El Bouaghi
Abstract
Research into academic vocabulary has heatedly received considerable scholarly attention in recent years that has led to proliferating divergent studies (Coxhead, 2000; Nation, 2001). By far, the major attainments of these studies have epitomized to identify academic vocabulary in the form of word lists. Along with these studies and because of the lack of academic word list confined for writing master theses general introductions, the current corpus-based lexical study aimed; at one extreme, to explore the most frequently used academic vocabulary across 30 applied linguistics master theses general introductions compiled into six equal-sized corpora from 2013 to 2018. At the other extreme, it attempted to establish an academic word list for writing master theses general introductions from a corpus that consisted of 28144 running words and compared it with other word lists to ensure its validity. To carry out the research, a number of computerized tools were used to profile and order the academic word list alphabetically and categorize it into word families; namely, AntWordProfiler, AntFileConverter, Familizer, and TextFixer program. The analysis, then, proceeded by generating the word list ensuing Coxhead's (2000) method using frequency, range, and specialized occurrence as major criteria for word form selection. The results, obtained from the quantitative analysis of the corpus, reveal that the introductory academic word list contains 349 word families to provide a useful academic word resource for non-native English learners who need to accomplish their master theses. In essence, the findings suggest that it is a requisite to generate field-specific academic word lists for English foreign language students to strengthen their academic writing proficiency. On account of these findings, a number of pedagogical implications are given to teachers, students, and syllabus designers with reference to the restraints that obstructed this work from being more elaborated.
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Keywords
Academic word list, Quantitative analys