Abstract
This paper is divided in two parts, in the first one we address the different definitions of academic vocabulary, the role of academic vocabulary in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) teaching, and present some of the academic word lists compiled up to the present day. The second part of this paper is dedicated to one of the applications of these word lists: to determine the vocabulary profile of a corpus. Hence, the investigation conducted relies on the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) to determine the use of academic vocabulary in a corpus of Brazilian students. It also addresses the issue of the different coverage provided by the AVL and the Academic Word List (AWL). The results indicate that the AVL is more representative of academic vocabulary in the corpus used as a reference.
Highlights
Academic words are lexical items that are recurrent in academic texts (Chung and Nation, 2003; Clark and Ishida, 2005) and, are not usually acquired in everyday interaction
Considering English for Academic Purposes teaching, vocabulary has been surrounded by debates on whether EAP teachers, English teachers who are responsible for teaching academic genres or content area teachers, teachers of a specific field of study, such as Engineering, Law, etc, should focus their classes on it
This analysis shows one of the applications of wordlists while it highlights the fact that students represented in the BrAWE corpus are not, at least considering Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) coverage, less apt to use academic vocabulary than users of EAP represented in other academic corpora
Summary
Academic words are lexical items that are recurrent in academic texts (Chung and Nation, 2003; Clark and Ishida, 2005) and, are not usually acquired in everyday interaction. Several researchers (Coxhead, 2000; Gardner and Davies 2014; Browne, Culligan and Phillips 2014, among others) have dedicated themselves to the development of academic word lists that could be used as a resource for EAP teachers and material developers. Taking this into account, the first part of this paper discusses definitions of academic vocabulary, the role of academic vocabulary in EAP teaching, and presents the academic word lists compiled up to today. It is referred to as the first 2,000 most frequent words in English
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