ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES, vol.74, pp.29-42, 2024 (SSCI)
The
assembly of corpus-based discipline-specific word lists for pedagogical
purposes has recently been on the rise (e.g., Arndt,
2022; Fraser, 2007; O’Flynn, 2019; Yang, 2015). In order
to cater to the needs of learners in veterinary medicine (VM) for
field-specific academic literacy, this paper analyses a reiteration of the Veterinary
Medicine Corpus (Özer
& Akbaş, 2022; hereafter
the VMC), assembling a specified list of academic words used in published
research articles (RAs) in VM. This list could serve as the foundation of a
disciplinary syllabus for EAP students studying VM. So far, VM has remained
largely unexplored with the exception of Durrant's (2009) limited
coverage of VM texts. The analysis was conducted using LancsBox 6.0, prompted
to yield a list of PoS-tagged lemmas (P-lemmas) sorted by frequency (Coxhead, 2000; Yang, 2015) and dispersion (Arndt, 2022). The most
frequent 1,000 lemmas for each content word category were collated into a
candidate list. We then manually eliminated proper nouns and GSL (West, 1953) words. The
final list, the Veterinary Medicine Academic Word List (VMAWL), contains 835
PoS-tagged lemmas (P-lemmas), a reiteration of which was produced by adding the
types in Bauer and Nation’s (1993) taxonomy
at the second level to test coverage. The VMAWL was profiled and validated
against the four parent categories independently on AntWordProfiler (Anthony, 2022a) with analysis
showing the VMAWL comprises 13.75% of the VMC and diverges greatly from generic
word lists like the AWL, NGSL, new-GSL, and AVL. The list can be used to
develop teaching materials for EAP or ESP academic writing courses.