The paper presents a corpus-based lexical study that resulted in establishing the Dentistry Research Articles Corpus containing 749,289 running words from 240 research articles with an average length of 3100 words. The range and frequency analysis with AntWordProfiler free software yielded a Dentistry Academic Word List (DAWL) containing 358-word forms or 279-word families. The study focused on the most frequently-used dentistry academic vocabulary. Six subject areas were identified with the help of dentists engaged in academic work in the field. For the members of a word family to be included in the DAWL, they were to occur in at least four subject areas, that is, more than a half of the six subject areas that constituted “Dentistry” subject area in the corpus and outside the first 2,000 most frequently-occurring word families of English. The findings suggest that the language of dentistry stands a little bit apart from the language of medicine, which presents only 3,39 % of the Dentistry Research Articles Corpus. Whereas the coverage of the Academic word list (AWL) is similar to the data received by the frequency analysis researchers of medical academic language. The results displayed in creating the Corpus and in developing the Word List are an important tool for EAP researchers by providing the pool of words to be used in material designing. Students, if acquainted with the List, will feel more confident in developing their lexical skills.
Translated title of the contributionCOMPILING ‘DENTISTRY ACADEMIC WORD LIST’ AS A BASIS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH INTO THE NATURE OF EAP AND ESP TEACHING
Original languageRussian
Pages (from-to)23-31
JournalИностранные языки в высшей школе
Issue number2(45)
StatePublished - 22 Jun 2018

    Research areas

  • corpus studies, dentistry, academic English

ID: 36580176