Academic vocabulary and collocations used in language teaching and applied linguistics textbooks

Abstract

Somewhere between technical and general vocabulary are located those words which are used in formal academic contexts with a high frequency across scientific disciplines (Farrell 1990). These are referred to as academic vocabulary. Recent findings do not support the adequacy of a single academic wordlist which can equally meet the needs of students of all disciplines (Durrant 2016), and this has inspired researchers to develop wordlists specific to each discipline. Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics is a discipline which often embraces a high number of non-English speaking students for whom it is a demanding task to engage in academic communication without having access to a ready-made resource. In the present study, a 10,781,188-word corpus based on textbooks taught in thirteen subject areas of this field was compiled. The corpus was characterized by a specified genre and time-span, and a large representative scope. It was used to draw up a list of academic words (= terminology) for students of this field. The wordlist, which is accompanied by a list of collocations, accounts for approximately 7.1% of the coverage in the corpus. The findings build on the trend toward generation of field-specific academic wordlists, which have significant implications for students, instructors, material developers and researchers.