Academic Vocabulary in Sport Tourism News: A Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

The objectives of the research is to study and analyze Academic Word List (AWL), which appeared in the corpus of sport tourism news wordlists collected from international online news. The framework of this study was based on Coxhead’s (2000) 570-Academic Word List (AWL). A corpus of 112,623 running words taken from the international online news, against the AWL of 570 words by using the Concordance Program, AntWordProfiler, for comparing the vocabulary load of the corpus of sport tourism news and AWL. The data were analyzed and displayed as percentages and frequencies. The results revealed that words in the AWL covered 7.38 % of the total words in the corpus. Findings also revealed that some of the words found in the present study were not found in Coxhead’s AWL. This suggests that vocabulary needs of students in sport or tourism are characteristically different from those of students in other disciplines. The findings indicate the usefulness of AWL for sport learners and suggest the need to produce field-specific word lists embracing all frequent academic vocabulary items necessary for the expression of the rhetoric of the specific discipline. The Sport Tourism News wordlists can guide instructors to prepare the sport or tourism students in setting their vocabulary learning goals.