Selecting ESP reading materials. Vocabulary suitability of science magazines for English for Science teaching and learning

Abstract

Bearing in mind that teachers often find themselves in a position where they have to produce their own teaching materials for English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classes, vocabulary profiling studies of certain genres may be of help in such situations. English for Science is an ESP field commonly taught around the world; however, despite this, the teaching resources for it are not as plentiful as the ESP teachers would like them to be. With this in mind, in this paper we study the vocabulary profile of science magazines, a genre that is generally written for non-expert audience and includes reports, news and opinions about science. We determine how complex the vocabulary of this genre is, using a corpus of approximately 230,000 running words, and define how many words are needed to reach the minimum reading comprehension level. We also determine how much high-frequency general, academic and scientific vocabulary this genre contains. Based on this, we draw conclusions on the target ESP audience these texts would be most useful for.