AN INVESTIGATION OF ACADEMIC WORD LIST (AWL) AND GENERAL SERVICE LIST (GSL) IN HARD SCIENCES’ RESEARCH ARTICLES: MEETING THE RISING DEMANDS IN ESP
Abstract
Taking the dynamic nature of English language in Academic Context into account, there is a consistent need in ESP and EAP for specific corpora, to which the students can refer to check their language productions and several other uses by the professionals and instructors. The present study aims to have an evaluative view over the two well-known group of words namely GSL and AWL. To this end, a Hard Sciences corpus of about 4 million words was developed from research article texts in six main fields of Energy Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanic Engineering, Computer Sciences, Chemistry and Physics. Then, it was further analyzed by a web application which was also designed by the researchers. The Coverage of Coxhead’s (2000) AWL and also West (1952) were both analyzed and the results of the analysis showed that the developed corpus is a valid one and can be used to develop a new academic Word List for application in the respective fields.
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