Abstract

This paper is intended to develop a word list that helps engineering students with engineering vocabulary frequently used across different disciplines. For this goal, an Engineering English Corpus (EEC) including around 4,000,000 running words was compiled and constructed from 40 textbooks commonly used in 8 engineering disciplines: chemical, computer, electrical, electronics, environmental, industrial, materials science and mechanical. This paper identified a total of 1,170 word families comprised of General Service List (GSL), Academic Word List (AWL) and Technical Word List (TWL) through two criteria such as frequency and range. In detail, the cut-off frequency of GSL and AWL was more than 100 times and the range was at least 10 times in all 8 disciplines exclusive of TWL. The result of the analysis showed that 1) not all words in GSL and AWL were used frequently in the EEC; 2) GSL, AWL and TWL could be learned and taught regardless of the pre-determined order; 3) the created engineering English word list could meet the basic need of engineering students.

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