چکیده:
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.
خلاصه ماشینی:
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.
Assuming that university students know a general service vocabulary, the researchers tried to work out the most important words of academic English beyond West’s (1953) GSL.
Esfandiari and Moein, analyzing a corpus of food science texts, developed a word list for food science and technology and Munzo identified the vocabulary of agriculture semi-popularization articles.
, 2009; Munoz, 2015), 106 Chemistry (Valipoori & Nassaji, 2013), Social Sciences (Kwary & Artha, 2017) and Nursing (Yang 2015), there have been almost no studies, to the best knowledge of the researcher, investigating academic words in psychology texts.
The corpus was also investigated to find out the general and academic words which are highly frequent in psychology texts but are absent in the GSL and AWL lists.
Table 3 displays the number of GSL and AWL word families which were of high and low frequency in the psychology corpus.
Moreover, the study revealed many high frequency words which university students in general and psychology students in particular need to know but the words are absent in the GSL and AWL lists.
Mudraya (2006) exploring a corpus of 113 engineering texts developed a list of 1200 words, which did not include many GSL word families.
(2008) indicated that 95 AWL word families were of low frequency in applied linguistics texts and there were 128 highly frequent words in their corpus which were absent in the AWL.