The History, Present Situation and Trend of Specific Topic Word List

Abstract

As an important tool in vocabulary learning, word lists play an important role in vocabulary research. From the perspective of diachronic and synchronic, this paper comprehensively analyzes the research process, current situation and trend of word lists with specific themes, and summarizes the construction of its corpus, vocabulary screening criteria and the presentation of vocabulary. The results show that: 1) In terms of the construction of the corpus, the size of the corpus used in the construction of various thesaurus varies, but the written language corpus of the academic word list with specific topics is mostly composed of journal papers and textbooks. The topic - specific technical word list is related to manuals, reference books and other more specialized genres. 2) In terms of vocabulary selection criteria, most the academic word list with specific topics adopts frequency, range and specialized occurrence, but specialized occurrence has been questioned in recent years. The recognition methods of technical words are mostly mixed. In addition, scholars will also use criteria such as frequency and range to further select words, but the adoption of the criteria of range is also controversial. 3) In terms of the presentation of vocabulary, the academic word list with specific topics mostly uses lemma, while the technical word list mostly uses word type. The findings of this paper will provide references for ESP researchers and English teachers on the development and application of vocabulary in this subject area in their research and teaching.