원문정보
초록
영어
This research study considers the problem of Japanese university students who are studying the sciences in their native language, but who also may be expected to do at least part of their reading through textbooks written in English. The article presents a Science Textbook Word List (STWL), derived from a 700,000-word academic corpus compiled from English-medium textbooks intended for science majors. The STWL contains 309 word families, which accounts for 13.4% of the tokens in the science textbook corpus under study. The high word frequency and the wide text coverage of academic vocabulary throughout the science textbooks confirm that academic vocabulary plays an important role in science textbooks. The study also found that the STWL provided better coverage of the studied corpus than the widely used Academic Word List (AWL) (Coxhead, 2000), and another science word list (Coxhead & Hirsh, 2007). These results demonstrate that corpus-specific word lists provide more coverage of the intended texts with fewer items. This is of benefit to the students as the amount of learning time can be significantly reduced, and the effort put in to learn such lists is well repaid by the opportunity for using the vocabulary.
목차
Introduction
Literature Review
Academic Word Lists
Discipline-Specific Word Lists
Science Word Lists
Methodology
The Compilation of the Corpus
Word Selection Criteria
Results and Discussion
The Science Textbook Word List and Coverage of Corpora
Word List Comparisons
Conclusion
Pedagogical Implications
Acknowledgments
The Authors
References
Appendix A