[Corpora-List] Criteria for an ESP Vocabulary List

[Adam Turner]

With regards to ESP and ESL vocabulary learning, I am not sure that
frequency is always the best guide for compiling such lists and may not be
as useful to instructors as some researchers may think. As a classroom
instructor, I find that corpora research for education divorced from the
context and genre sometimes has limited uses. Unsuprisingly, I find that the
most frequent words are the ones that students already know. I read a highly
detailed article on a concordance analysis of engineering English with all
kinds of frequency statistics but very little of interest to me as an
instructor despite the amount of work it took to create the article. In
other words, when we move from description to teaching, the value of corpora
analysis may differ.

More useful, however, are collocation lists or lexical chunks within a
specific genre of writing and/or field of research. A word like method may
appear frequently but almost all students know this word. They may not,
however, be able to exploit all the collocations/frames/lexical chunks/fixed
expressions where it might occur in an ESP context:

Collocation: novel/proposed/innovative/alternative/ -method.
Chunk/frame example with comparative:   In contrast to the conventional
method A, our proposed method B improves accuracy/reliability by C .....
In addition, I think it would be more valuable to have the students work on
and select the vocabulary words that they don't know than to have the
instructor prepare them for the students using electronic corpora or not.  I
don't have the reference handy, but recent work has cast some doubt on the
universality of even well know academic word lists when searching across
disciplines. The example of words like "stress" being used very diferently
in mechanical or civil engineering than in other fields is an oft cited
example.

I think it would depend on what kind of corpus you have and how specific
your audience is. If it is not too specific, you could get a lot of use out
of Google Scholar discipline specific searches to roughly gauge frequency,
for example. If it is highly specific corpus then students could probably
just select their own words from readings and give them to you.

My students want to know not how frequent a word is but whether or not that
particular word is the appropriate one for that particular sentence in the
context of the paragraph they are writing in the context of the genre of
writing they are doing.

I am however very convinced of the benefits of combining genre analysis and
concordancing, and of the value of examining how collocations and lexical
chunks behave within a particular genre and register of a type of writing in
a particular field. After teaching engineering writing classes, I do wonder
however whether there is such a thing as say "mechanical" engineering in
terms of the language of a discipline as the field can be quite diverse from
automotive engineering to CAD design to fluid dynamics. This goes back to
the old debate over how specific ESP teaching should be.

Even when vocabulary work is well informed by corpora, we often still get
these fill in the blank types of exercises from them that all teachers know
only test lower level recognition and passive vocabulary and that the
students can't always activate in productive skills like writing and
speaking. We all do them because they are easy to make and score.

Continuing a previous thread on the relationship between research and
teaching, I would be interested in hearing researcher's perspectives on why
it is so important to concentrate on frequency so much. I think more useful
work could be done at the phrase/frame/chunk level for classroom
applications.

Adam



On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 2:41 PM, True Friend <true.friend2004 at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> Hi
> I am working on a project of ESP. I have to generate vocabulary lists.
> What is the best criteria to generate vocabulary list? Frequency or the
> Range (occurance in number of files in corpus, or how wide the word is used
> in corpus)? Keyword generators work on the basis of frequency i.e. antconc
> and wordsmith tools etc. They generate a list by comparing with reference
> corpus a list of words having more frequency in specialized corpus and less
> in reference corpus. Frequency basis is fine but Range has its importance
> i.e. if a word is most frequent but used only in 10 files is less important
> then a less frequent word found in more files. So what are your
> suggestions.  Personally I'll prefer frequency because there is no software
> available to generate keywords on the basis of Range or Ranking, or to
> arrange the words from a list on the basis of their Range (i.e. more range
> will have number 1 and so on).
> Regards
> --
> محمد شاکر عزیز
> _______________________________________________
> Corpora mailing list
> Corpora at uib.no
> http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora
>
>


-- 
Adam Turner

Director
English Writing Lab
Hanyang University
Center for Teaching and Learning
Seoul, Korea
http://ctl.hanyang.ac.kr/writing/
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