AKADEMSKI VOKABULAR U APSTRAKTIMA STUDENATA MASTER STUDIJA NA POLjOPRIVREDNOM FAKULTETU

Abstract

This study examines the proportion of word families from the Academic Word List (AWL) compiled by Coxhead (2000) in abstracts written by Master’s degree stu- dents at the Faculty of Agriculture in Belgrade. The novelty of our study is that we focus on student writing in the field of agriculture and on abstracts as a type of assignment. One of the aims was to find out whether the proportion of academic terms used by the students correlated with their CEFR level, and another one was to determine the most frequent word families. The proportion of all word families from the list in the corpus consisting of abstracts was calculated, as well as the number of tokens for each of them and their relative frequency. There was no correlation between the students’ CEFR level and the proportion of academic terms used in their texts. The proportion of studied word families was limited, and the analysis of the meaning and collocations of the 10 most frequent word families indicates a specific use by the students of agriculture. These findings question the applicability of general academic vocabulary lists to all disciplines and suggest the creation of a specific list for academic writing instruction in the field of agriculture. The results of this study may be useful for improving the teaching of English to mixed-ability classes at universities. A broader contribution could be the better use of academic vocabulary in students’ papers, which correlates with their overall academic success.