Vocabulary Hunting Inside the Veterinary Medicine Corpus for English for Very Specific Academic Writing


Özer M., Akbaş E.

First International Language-for-All Conference ‘22, Adana, Türkiye, 21 - 22 Ekim 2022

  • Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Yayınlanmadı
  • Basıldığı Şehir: Adana
  • Basıldığı Ülke: Türkiye
  • Abdullah Gül Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

This ongoing corpus-based study explores a corpus of veterinary medicine academic writing,

the VetMedCorp (Özer & Akbaş, 2022) (hereafter the VMC) to produce a generic lexical

reference out of the most frequently used words in an array of sub-disciplines in the same field.

To this end, the VMC was analyzed on Lancsbox 6.0 (Brezina et al., 2020) to get a frequencybased PoS-tagged list of lemmas. 201,573 lemmas were listed by the software. We included

only four parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective, and adverb) in our analyses. The top 1,000

most-frequent words for each of these four parts of speech were extracted, and a total of 4,000

lemmas were collated to get a list of essential veterinary medicine vocabulary with a disciplinespecific frequency pattern. The dispersion of the words was shown as the coefficient of

variation (CV) to get a clearer picture of how these words are distributed across the chosen

sub-segments of veterinary medicine research articles in the corpus, with some pedagogical

implications. The output is still being manually treated to reveal the word families. Preliminary

findings feature more than 200 word families that can be of help in teaching academic writing.

The study will continue with a multi-faceted comparison of the VMC list with other such lists

as the GSL (West, 1953), the AWL (Coxhead, 1996), the NGSL (Browne, 2014), and Yang’s

(2015) academic word list for Nursing to demonstrate how the VMC diverges from them. The

results are expected to be resourceful for ESP writing pedagogy.

Keywords

discipline-specific academic writing, corpus, veterinary medicine, vocabulary list