Creating a specialized word list for ESP college students

Abstract

The present study aims to create a word list to meet the needs of college students who need to understand English textbooks and develop practical knowledge in the area of airline cabin crew service (ACCS). A corpus of eleven cabin crew manuals was compiled (totaling 349,789 running words) to find the lexical coverage of the ACCS word list in the corpus and the high-frequency words that the list consists of. The word list was created according to three principles: specialized occurrence, range, and frequency. The results reveal that the General Service List (GSL) covers 58.16%, the Academic Word List (AWL) covers 18.47%, and the ACCS list covers 18.37% of the words in the corpus. The ACCS list includes 553 of the most frequent word families outside the GSL and AWL. The result from the small-scale reliability test of the ACCS coverage shows that the ACCS word list may serve as reference for a prospective English course in the field. Moreover, a comparison of the high-frequency word list with those of different disciplines showed significant differences among the lists. Although the size of the corpus is relatively small, the finding indicates that specialized vocabulary for the ACCS list is tied to the particular knowledge and the specific word list may be beneficial for ESP college students in the ACCS area. The study suggests that the ACCS word list may be a potential tool for incorporating vocabulary learning into a curriculum for learners and teachers.