A UBC textbook corpus to

identify EAP target vocabulary

Mike Murphy | BC TEAL Conference | May 22, 2015

What’s in it for you?• A better understanding of the Academic Word List• Food for thought about the nature of academic written

vocabulary• Technical tips, if you’re new to corpus research• An engineering-specific academic word list to use in your

teaching

Agenda• Introduction

• The academic vocabulary controversy / Research questions and design

• Background• Lexical thresholds / GSL and AWL / Previous engineering lists

• Methodology Notes• Identifying target texts / Notes on logistics

• Results• FEC coverage comparisons / Overlap between FEWL and AWL /

Word technicality assessment

• Conclusions• Is there an academic vocabulary? / Classroom applications of

FEWL

INTRODUCTION• Is there an academic vocabulary?• Research questions• Research design

Is there an academic vocabulary?

Yes.• Paul Nation (2013): notwithstanding the distinctive

linguistic features of texts from different academic disciplines, all scholars share a common vocabulary because they perform common communicative functions, such as evaluating research, describing methods, and presenting and discussing data

• Word lists for EAP vocabulary teaching and learning should be derived from general academic corpora.

Is there an academic vocabulary?

No.• Hyland and Tse (2007): “It is by no means certain that

there is a single academic literacy which university students need to acquire to participate in academic environments, and we believe that a perspective which seeks to identify and teach such a vocabulary … does not correspond with the ways language is actually used in academic writing”

• Word lists for EAP vocabulary teaching and learning should be based on discipline-specific corpora.

Research questions

To what extent can there be said to exist a general, non-discipline-specific academic English?

1. How well will Coxhead’s AWL, an EAP word list derived from a general academic corpus, cover the lexis in a corpus of first-year engineering textbooks?

2. Compared to AWL, how well will a word list that is derived from the first-year engineering corpus cover the lexis in the corpus?

3. If the items in the engineering-specific word list differ from the items in AWL, what proportion of the non-AWL items will be too technical to use in non-engineering-specific EAP contexts?

Research design• Build a corpus of all textbooks used in first-year UBC

engineering courses for the 2014-’15 academic year• From this “First-year Engineering Corpus” (FEC), derive a

“First-year Engineering Word List” (FEWL) that resembles AWL in these ways:• Consists of the 570 most frequent word families in the corpus,

divided into 10 sublists by frequency• Excludes items from the General Service List (West 1953)

Research design (con’d)

• Compare coverages of FEC provided by the general and discipline-specific word lists AWL and FEWL

• Assess whether FEWL items that do not overlap with AWL are too technical for certain EAP contexts.

BACKGROUND• Lexical thresholds for effective reading• The General Service List and Academic Word List• Previous engineering-specific word lists

Lexical thresholds for effective reading

• research suggests readers must know 95% of a text’s words to be able to guess the unknown words and have reasonable comprehension of the text overall.• Liu and Nation (1985)• Hirsh and Nation (1992)• Laufer (1992)

The General Service List• Developed in 1940s mainly to support creation of

simplified, difficulty-sequenced ESL readers• 2,000 word families divided into GSL 1 and GSL 2• Gives an average of 82% coverage of various written

texts (Hirsh and Nation, 1992)• Has been criticized by some due to its age and written

focus but Nation and Waring (1997) claim it is still best available list of high-frequency English

• A New General Service List is available

AWL: Profile of the corpus • Based on a 3.5M-token corpus of academic texts

• 4 broad areas—Arts, Commerce, Law, Science—each encompassing 7 disciplines, for a total of 28 disciplines

• Text types represented: Journal articles, textbooks and coursebooks, texts from the ‘Learned and Scientific’ subcorpora of Wellington, Brown, LOB

AWL: Profile of the word list• Three broad selection criteria for list items

1. Distinctiveness – vocabulary item does not appear on GSL

2. Frequency – item appears at least 100 times in corpus as a whole

3. Range – items appears… a) At least 10 times in each of the 4 macro-discipline subcorpora

(Arts, Commerce, Law, Science )

b) At least once in 15 or more of the 28 subject areas subsumed by the four macro-disciplines

Coverage of Coxhead’s academic corpus provided by GSL and AWL

   Academic Word List

General Service List  Total

Subcorpus GSL 1 GSL 2

Arts 9.3 73.0 4.4 86.7

Commerce 12.0 71.6 5.2 88.8

Law 9.4 75.0 4.1 88.5

Science 9.1 65.7 5.0 79.8

Previous engineering lists: Englist (Ward ,1999)• Developed at a Thai university for engineering students• Unlike AWL, overlaps with GSL• 2,000 word families, derived from a 1M-token corpus

• Corpus made up of one textbook each from five required first-year engineering courses at his university

• EngList covered 95% of Ward’s engineering corpus• Ward favours word lists derived from discipline-

specific corpora

EngList vs. GSL/UWLSubject Grouping Subject GSL/UWL

(2,836 words)

GSL Ward’s EngList

(2,000 words)

Background Science

Biology 85.9 76.5 79.5

Chemistry 88.7 76.1 89.2

Physics 92.5 81.7 94.3

Background

Engineering

Engineering Materials 86.5 76.0 89.4

Engineering

Mechanics

92.0 83.0 97.4

Fluid Mechanics 92.1 79.9 97.4

Specialist

Engineering

Mechanical

Engineering

80.3 71.4 84.2

Chemical Engineering 92.5 80.1 91.7

Electrical Engineering 94.1 81.7 96.7

Humanities

Economics 92.6 82.8 86.1

Philosophy 95.0 87.2 87.3

Psychology 91.0 80.9 84.4

Previous engineering lists:

The SEEC list (Mudraya, 2006)• Also developed in Thai university context• 2M-token Student Engineering English Corpus (SEEC)

• 13 complete textbooks used in required undergrad engineering courses

• ‘Keyness’ comparison with reference corpora BoE and BNC

• Most unusually frequent SEEC items that also had good range over 13 subcorpora were high frequency or general academic lexis, NOT technical lexis

Previous engineering lists:

Mudraya’s observations• Verbs that scored highest on keyness measures and

occurred in at least 5 of 13 subcorpora: act, apply, assume, be, become, calculate, consider, correspond to, define, determine, exert, give, illustrate, indicate, locate, obtain, occur, require, show, sketch, solve, substitute, use

• Distinctive lexis in her engineering corpus not engineering-specific • we can identify a general, pan-academic English and it, not

discipline-specific lexis, should be focus of EAP studies

METHODOLOGY NOTES• Identifying target texts• Logistical Notes

Identifying target courses/readingsSubject Area Course

Comp. Sci. • Introduction to Computation in Engineering Design

Chemistry • Chemistry for Engineering

English • Strategies for University Writing

Math

• Differential Calculus with Applications to Physical Science and

Engineering

• Integral Calculus with Applications to Physical Science and

Engineering

• Linear Systems

Physics

• Introductory Physics for Engineers I

• Introductory Physics for Engineers II

• Mechanics

Notes on logistics

• Software used to…• Convert .PDFs of textbook pages to text files:

PDF2TXT, v. 3.2• Clean text files: EditPad Lite 7• Make frequency counts: AntConc concordancing

software (v. 3.4)• Calculate coverages: Microsoft Excel• Obtain electronic copies of AWL and GSL:

Paul Nation’s Range program

RESULTS • FEC coverage comparisons• Overlap between FEWL and AWL• Word technicality assessment

Coverage of FEC by GSL, AWL, and FEWL

English Comp. Sci.

Chem. Math Physics Overall

General Service List (GSL)

80.8 78.0 77.0 81.1 80.9 79.5

Academic Word List (AWL)

10.6(91.4)

13.0(91.1)

9.9(86.9)

9.1(90.2)

7.9 (88.8)

10.1 (89.7)

First-year Engineering Word List (FEWL)

10.2(91)

18.3(96.3)

16.9(93.9)

16.0(97.1)

14.9(95.8)

15.3(94.8)

Most frequent FEWL items in each FEC subcorpus

English Comp. Sci. Chem. Math Physics

1. research function† react function† energy††

2. scholar data atom equation*** magnet

3. genre computer molecule vector potential

4. community array chemical matrix magnitude

5. summary file energy†† graph conduct

6. abstract vary electron††† linear constant

7. define* define* equation*** define* section**

8. cite structure bond theorem positive

9. identify equation*** equilibrium integral electron†††

10. culture section** ion section** wavelength

Top 50 FEWL words*non-AWL words are bolded

1. function 11. atom 21. electron 31. positive 41. integral

2. equation 12. matrix 22. potential 32. sum 42. negative

3. react 13. constant 23. area 33. equilibrium 43. ion

4. define 14. molecule 24. array 34. element 44. loop

5. energy 15. research 25. chemical 35. maximum 45. correspond

6. computer 16. structure 26. identify 36. series 46. magnitude

7. section 17. linear 27. magnet 37. initial 47. estimate

8. data 18. process 28. volume 38. require 48. axis

9. vector 19. chapter 29. file 39. occur 49. bond

10. vary 20. graph 30. assume 40. conduct 50. theorem

Overlap between FEWL and AWLFEWL Sublist

 

Non-AWL words in FEWL sublist

FEWL headwords that are non-AWL

Sublist 1 20 20 / 60 (33%)

Sublist 2 19 39 / 120 (33%)

Sublist 3 24 63 / 180 (35%)

Sublist 4 33 96 / 240 (40%)

Sublist 5 31 127 / 300 (42%)

Sublist 6 27 154 / 360 (43%)

Sublist 7 35 189 / 420 (45%)

Sublist 8 34 223 / 480 (46%)

Sublist 9 35 258 / 540 (48%)

Sublist 10 17 275 / 570 (48%)

Word technicality scale (Coxhead and Nation, 2001)

Category 1

item appears rarely if ever outside a particular field (e.g. in Law, jactitation, per curieam, cloture)

Category 2

item is used both inside and outside a particular field, but the meaning it conveys outside the field is completely different from the meaning it has in the field (e.g. in Law, a caution is a formal warning recited by a police officer when arresting a suspect; in its non-legal usage it means ‘prudence’ or ‘circumspection’)

Category 3

item is used both inside and outside a given field but most of its uses with a particular meaning occur in the field (e.g. most instances of reconstruction appear in legal discourse, but occurrences with this meaning also appear outside the field of Law). Crucially, specialized, ‘in-field’ meaning “is readily accessible through its meaning outside the field”

Category 4

item is somewhat more common inside than outside of field but specialization of meaning is minimal or non-existent (e.g. judge, mortgage, trespass)

Technicality results

Of the 275 FEWL items that do not overlap with AWL,• 176 (or 64%) were deemed non-technical • 99 (or 36%) were deemed technical

Top 10 non-AWL FEWL headwords judged 'technical' and

'non-technical'Technical Non-Technical

1. vector 1. atom

2. matrix 2. linear

3. molecule 3. graph

4. electron 4. magnet

5. array 5. equilibrium

6. ion 6. magnitude

7. loop 7. dense

8. axis 8. radius

9. theorem 9. scholar

10. velocity 10. wavelength

CONCLUSIONS

Is there an academic vocabulary?• Yes, to an extent: Coxhead’s claim that AWL covers about

10% of lexis in academic texts holds up in this study, in the case of first-year UBC engineering texts

• However, at 15%, FEWL provides engineering EAP students with a much greater return on their investment in vocabulary study

Applications of FEWL?• Not suitable for mixed-major, pre-sessional EAP classes

• Could be given to engineering students in the class to be used for self-study

• Suitable for situations in which all students are taking or preparing to take engineering classes and the instructor has some specialized knowledge of engineering • E.g. engineering-specific pre-sessional courses; in-sessional

adjunct courses

Contact information• Mike Murphy, English Language Institute, • mike.murphy@ubc.ca

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