A Corpus-based Comparative Study of Semi-technical and Technical Vocabulary  

Oleh:

Zhang, Min

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: The Asian ESP Journal vol. 9 no. 2 (2013), page 148-172.
Topik: technical vocabulary; semi-technical vocabulary; corpus linguistics; information engineering
Fulltext: 148-172.pdf (221.36KB)

Isi artikel

This study is a corpus-based lexical study that is aimed at comparing semi-technical vocabulary and technical vocabulary to address the specific needs of undergraduates majoring in information engineering in mainland China through the study of bilingual specialized courses. A 1,024,882word corpus of Information Engineering English Corpus (IEEC) was built using texts from ten specialized courses. Semi-technical and technical vocabulary items were profiled using West’s (1953) General Service List and Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List. A quantitative analysis was carried out to find the optimal frequency threshold for high-frequency academic/semitechnical and technical vocabulary specific to the discipline of Information Engineering. As a result, 248 semi-technical and 166 technical word families were extracted covering 9.16% and 4.95% of the total tokens of the corpus. The pilot study further explored the selected vocabulary of varying specificity in terms of their lexical features as well as collocations and found that there is a continuum rather than distinct boundaries between the GSL, discipline-specific academic and technical words when they are manipulated to serve specific purpose Pedagogical implications are that language instructors should take advantage of corpus linguistic expertise in the teaching of specialized English vocabulary.

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