جستجوی مقالات مرتبط با کلیدواژه "academic vocabulary" در نشریات گروه "ادبیات و زبان ها"

With the global spread of English as the lingua franca for academic publishing, non-native researchers and university students are constantly facing linguistic barriers including insufficient vocabulary knowledge in writing for publication. This persistent need motivated the development of a good number of corpus-based word lists for frequently used academic and technical words in research articles across disciplines. Nevertheless, despite its importance in corpus-based study of language for word list development, replication research has received far less attention in this line of inquiry. The current study aimed to address this gap and replicated two published studies that investigated the use of academic vocabulary in applied linguistics research articles. To this end, research articles published from 2010 to 2020 in 20 well-known journals in the field were collected, and a corpus with around 48 million words was compiled and analyzed. The findings indicated that academic vocabulary accounted for 11.46% of the corpus, which is similar and close to the reported coverage of the AWL in replicated studies. However, regarding the frequently occurring academic and non-academic content words, the findings showed considerable variation with respect to the results reported earlier. In light of these findings, the study highlighted the importance of replication research to test the reliability of corpus-based vocabulary studies that developed field-specific academic word lists. Finally, the study developed an updated version for applied linguistics academic word list, that might be regarded as a resource and guide for the vocabulary learning component of the relevant EAP programs in the field.

English academic vocabulary is significant for learning and teaching academic reading comprehension and writing skills for both native and non-native speakers. Hence, it is essential for academics including researchers, teachers, learners, material developers, and syllabus designers to know what has been done on academic word list development. This implies a systematic review. The current systematic review tended to identify, describe, appraise, and synthesize main themes and sub-themes as well as applications and implications of academic word list development from 2000 to 2020. Overall, 60 studies met the established criteria. Different themes and sub-themes were identified. Also, applications and implications were categorized based on their main themes. Limitations, suggestions for further study, and implications were also discussed.

Despite the abundance of research investigating general and academic vocabularies and developing dozens of word lists, few studies have compared academic vocabulary with general service word lists such as conversation vocabulary. Many EAP researchers assume that university students need to know all the words in West’s (1953) General Service List (GSL) as a prerequisite to academic words (e.g., Coxhead’s, 2000) and teachers at language institutes recommend conversation students to learn words in Coxhead’s Academic Word List (AWL) as a follow-up to the GSL. The present study compared the academic and conversation vocabularies by exploring frequency and coverage of words in academic and conversation corpora. The GSL and AWL words were investigated in a conversation corpus and an academic corpus, each containing around 12 million running words. The analysis revealed that 1200 GSL word families were highly frequent in both corpora and 645 GSL word families were highly frequent in the conversation corpus but of low frequency in the academic texts. Also, a new academic word list of 700 word families was developed, which proved to be much more rigorous than Coxhead’s AWL. Further analysis indicated that the abovementioned 645 GSL words had a very low coverage of academic texts (0.7%), while they covered 4.05% of the conversation corpus. The new academic word list covered only 1.6% of the conversation corpus, whereas it had a high coverage of the academic texts (9.1%), much higher than that of the AWL (7.5%). The analysis of some other academic corpora revealed identical results.

The purpose of this study was to determine the contribution of academic vocabulary knowledge and academic listening self-concept to the academic listening comprehension of Iranian Engineering students. The participants of this study were 147 undergraduate students at the Iran University of Science and Technology. A revised version of the academic self-concept questionnaire developed by Liu and Wang (2005), an academic vocabulary test by Schmitt, Schmitt, and Clapham (2001), and a sample of IELTS academic listening test were the instruments of this study. The results of the data analysis revealed that academic vocabulary knowledge and academic self-concept both contributed to the learners’ academic listening comprehension. The results also showed that the contribution of academic vocabulary knowledge to academic listening comprehension was higher than that of academic listening self-concept, indicating that the academic vocabulary knowledge was the significant contributor to academic listening comprehension. This study recommended that EGAP instructors make students aware of the importance of academic listening and help them improve their academic self-concept and vocabulary knowledge.

The objectives of this study were to investigate Engineering students’ attitudes and problems in academic reading comprehension and to determine the contribution of academic reading attitude, breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge to academic reading comprehension. The participants were 122 undergraduate students of Engineering at Iran University of Science and Technology. The Vocabulary Levels Test, the Word Associates Test, a reading section of an academic IELTS sample followed by one open-ended question about reading problems, and an academic reading attitude survey were the instruments of this study. The results of the study showed that (a) the global value the learners placed on the academic reading was the most frequent factor in their attitude towards academic reading; (b) the breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge were the statistically significant contributors to academic reading, while the contribution of attitude to academic reading was not statistically significant; and (c) ‘weak vocabulary knowledge’ was the most frequent problem reported by the learners.

University students are mainly advised to master the words in West’s General Service List (GSL) and Coxhead’s Academic Word List (AWL) in order to be able to read their academic texts easily and effectively. However, there are too many words in the two lists and a large number of them seem to be of less frequency in many academic disciplines; moreover, there are many important general and academic words which are missing in the two lists. The present study explored a corpus of psychology texts containing 3.4 million running words to work out the most frequent words used in psychology, a less investigated discipline. The corpus was analyzed by some text analysis software (TextStat and TextAnalys) and a list of 1587 most frequent word families was developed for psychology. The list included general English and academic words and no technical words of psychology. The frequency of GSL and AWL word families was investigated in the corpus to find out the GSL and AWL words highly frequent in psychology texts and also other high frequency words of psychology which are absent in the two lists. The results revealed that 1077 GSL and 95 AWL word families were of low frequency in psychology texts and there were 189 high frequency general and academic words which are absent in the GSL and AWL. The coverage of the developed psychology word list over the corpus was shown to be 2.2% higher than that of GSL plus AWL, although it contained 983 fewer words.

Lexical profiling has yielded fruitful results for language description and pedagogy (Liu, 2014), and particularly highlighted the significance of academic vocabulary for EFL learners in this process. This investigation, likewise, attempts to comparatively profile the vocabulary, more particularly the academic vocabulary, in the ‘abstract’ section of scholarly articles in Iranian and Anglo-American refereed journals in psychology. Iranian journals under study publish articles in Persian but also include an English abstract whereas the latter publish papers in English. For this purpose, a corpus (consisting of 307,126 words), with two sub-corpora of almost similar size and characteristics, was collected from Iranian and Anglo-American journals and analyzed through the software Range. The analyses conducted show a coverage of over 15 percent and the use of over 500 words of the Academic Word List (AWL) in both Iranian and Anglo-American sub-corpora. However, there are variations in academic and nonacademic vocabulary use in abstracts across the two sub-corpora above. Most of the academic words used belong to the beginning AWL sub-lists. Pedagogical implications are made for reading and writing, particularly in EAP contexts.

This article generates the first Persian Academic Word List (PAWL) which comprises the most frequently used academic vocabulary in Persian academic texts. The PAWL was compiled from a corpus of 927,008 running words from academic resources. Two principles of range and frequency of word families guided the selection and arrangement of the word list. The corpus included seven books and one hundred and twelve research articles selected from 28 journals using simple random sampling. The corpus pertained to seven disciplines including Arts and Architecture, Engineering and Technology, Agriculture and Natural resources, Medical sciences, Veterinary sciences, Humanities, and Basic sciences. The established PAWL contains 539 headwords, in books and research articles under study. The PAWL may serve as an essential frame of reference and a valuable source for Persian language learners, researchers and materials planners, particularly in developing materials when the mastery of Persian academic vocabulary and literacy is an aim.

The importance of vocabulary learning has been underlined in the field of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) because non-English majors who require reading English texts in their fields of study have to expand their English vocabulary knowledge much more efficiently than ordinary ESL/EFL learners. Since academic vocabulary instruction in Iranian universities is realized through the use of General English (GE) textbooks, the present study pursued a dual purpose of evaluating Iranian engineering undergraduates’ knowledge of academic vocabulary, as well as conducting a comparative corpus analysis of the academic vocabulary content of GE textbooks, electrical/electronic engineering Master’s Entrance Examinations, and authentic electrical and electronic engineering texts. The participants were 520 engineering students from ten universities. The corpora under study comprised a total of 1,180,000 running words. The results revealed an inadequacy of academic vocabulary knowledge among Iranian engineering undergraduates, as well as the fact that GE textbooks for engineering students do not have sufficient coverage of academic vocabulary as compared to M.S. examinations and authentic electronic engineering corpora. There was also insufficient correspondence between academic words in M.A. entrance exams and the authentic texts.