EAP vocabulary in native and learner corpora: from extraction to analysis

Abstract

Most studies of vocabulary in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) have emphasized the importance of a 'sub-technical' or 'academic' vocabulary alongside core words and technical terms in academic discourse. The 'Academic Word List' (Coxhead 2000) was compiled to complement the 'General Service List of English Words' (West 1953) and domain-specific items so as to approach the critical 95% coverage threshold needed for reasonable reading comprehension (Nation 2001:197) in higher education settings. While the 'Academic Word List' is undoubtedly a good supplement to the 'General Service List' for receptive purposes, it is questionable whether it is ideally suited for productive activities in EAP classes. Learners' needs for academic writing are clearly not the same as for academic reading. The aim of my presentation is to describe an alternative method, which uses a range of quantitative measures (keyness, frequency, range and evenness of distribution) to identify potential candidates for the development of a productively oriented academic word list. The resulting list contains a large number of words which are absent from the 'Academic Word List'. These findings highlight the fact that Coxhead’s criterion of non-appearance in the 'General Service List' is not really appropriate when it comes to productive purposes as lexical items may be included in the 2,000 most frequent words but used quite differently in EAP. A few examples extracted from the 'International Corpus of Learner English' (Granger et al.: 2002) will also show that these words need to be focused on in EAP materials as learners either significantly over- or underuse them, or use them in a limited number of phraseological patterns or in non-nativelike combinations. The potential influence of the mother tongue on learner use of EAP phraseological units will also be addressed