چکیده:
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.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Since the creation of the two lists, there have been some studies to evaluate them and figure out their coverage in other general and academic corpora (Chen & Ge, 2007; Cobb & Horst, 2004; Coxhead, 2000; Engels, 1968; Hirish & Nation, 1992; Hyland & Tse, 2007; Khani & Tazik, 2013; Moini & Islamizadeh, 2016; Nation & Hwang, 1995).
Most studies have evaluated the total coverage of the lists in their own corpora but they have not examined the frequency of every GSL and AWL word to find the truly general service and academic words.
The present study attempted to investigate the frequency of GSL and AWL word families in some academic and conversation corpora in order to find the words which are highly frequent in academic and conversation English.
However, recently there have been some criticisms against a monolithic academic vocabulary list and a trend to search for vocabulary lists for more specific academic disciplines (Chung, 2009; Esfandiari & Moein, 2015; Lei & Liu, 2016; Martinez, Beck & Panza, 2009; Moini & Islamizadeh, 2016; Mudraya, 2006; Munzo, 2015; Ward, 2009; Wang, Liang & Ge, 2008).
Results of Corpus Analysis Results To compare academic and conversation vocabularies and find high frequency words in conversational English and university texts, the researcher investigated the GSL and AWL word families in the academic and conversation corpora.
Many researchers have developed their academic vocabulary on top of the GSL or other lists of common general English words (Coxhead, 2000) but the results of the present study revealed that many general English words are not frequently used in academic texts.