Academic Words in Education Research Articles: A Corpus Study

摘要

Since the publication of Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List, attempts have been made to investigate the importance and relevance of this general academic vocabulary list in a range of different disciplines. The current paper is a corpus-based research to explore the word frequency and text coverage of Coxhead's AWL in research articles of education. To this end, 1.7 million-word corpus was compiled consisting of 239 research articles published byEducational Research Review, International Journal of Educational Development, International Journal of Educational Research, Linguistics and Education, Teaching and Teacher Educationduring the period of 2002 to 2010.Using WordSmith program, computer analysis showed that the AWL words accounted for 4.94% (84115 of the running words). The qualitative analysis also indicated huge differences in frequency of first two subsets in comparison to the rest (accounting for almost 50% of the whole occurrences). An attempt was also made to identify the most frequent word families of AWL in the Education Research Articles Corpus as well as to obtain a list of non-AWL words (not included in Coxhead's list nor West's General Service List) but still have the criteria to be included in the general academic vocabulary of education. A word to be included in the list must occur at least 50 times in the corpus and appear over 5 times in all journals. This study concluded that attempts must be made to create discipline-specific word lists. Further pedagogical implications are discussed in detail.