The Application of Corpus Tools in the Teaching of Discipline-Specific Academic Vocabulary: A Case Study for Information Engineering Undergraduates

This article concerns a corpus-based lexical study that is aimed at teaching academic vocabulary to address the specific needs of Chinese undergraduates majoring in information engineering. A 1,024,882-word corpus of Information Engineering English Corpus (IEEC) was built on the basis of university-level textbook materials drawn from ten compulsory courses for information engineering students. A quantitative analysis was carried out to seek for an optimal frequency threshold for extracting frequently occurring academic vocabulary specific to the discipline of information engineering based on Coxhead’s Academic Word List (2000). An innovative 2-dimensional categorization of AWL for EAP students was adopted in the study. As a result, a 100-word highly frequent core AWL and a 147-word frequent AWL were compiled for IEEC under two parameters of lexical frequency and specificity to individual sub-corpora. The present study further explored the application of corpus tools to highlight and effectively teach the discipline-specific academic vocabulary and collocations to promote learners’ autonomy and enhance their lexical competence in the study of specialized courses.