Research Information System
First International Language-for-All Conference ‘22, Adana, Turkey, 21 - 22 October 2022
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