From Frequency to Instructional Order: Insights from a Narrow-angle Corpus of Psychology RA Introductions

Abstract

For various reasons, ESP/EAP is credited with a good record of corpus-based inquiry. Among many different units in the body of language as a quantifiable pool, vocabulary can be an essential category for corpus-based studies. This study cuts across findings that deal with specialized or academic vocabulary, and presents a frequency-based set of lexical words derived from a narrow-angled corpus of psychology RA introductions. For the purpose of the study, 200 research article introductions in psychology were examined for their frequency obtaining 20 high frequency lexical words. Subsequently, the sentential contexts where each high frequency word occurred were put together and examined for difficulty. This provided an empirical basis for the instructional order of vocabulary items regarding the difficulty of the context in which each high frequency lexical word occurred. Findings from the study can cast light on which lexical words and with which instructional order can be instructed to meet the pedagogic needs of learners in ESP/EAP contexts.