A Search for Discipline-Specific Vocabulary Masaya Kanzaki Kanda University of International Studies JALT 2013, October 27 6:45-7:10, Room 304

Acknowledgements Scott Thornbury Ken Hyland

Purpose To suggest a way to create a discipline-specific vocabulary list

Materials Research article abstracts WordSmith Tools 6.0

Why abstracts? (1) Because they … contain the most important information of the article; the essential vocabulary to discuss the main topic is included in them. are concise; unnecessary words are omitted. condense many features of academic writing into short space.

Why abstract? (2) They are manageable because they … are freely available on the internet. can easily be copied and pasted digitally. are short. have no charts and tables.

About WordSmith Tools Scott, M. (2013). WordSmith Tools version 6, Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software. There are three tools: WordList creates a list of words or word clusters. Concord shows a word or a phrase in context. KeyWord finds the key words in a text.

How to find “keywords” By comparing the frequency of each word in a corpus with the frequency of the same word in a reference corpus →In this study, the frequency of each word in the RAA corpus was compared with that in the British National Corpus.

Keyness “Keyness” is determined by Dunning’s long likelihood test. Dunning, T. (1993). Accurate methods for the statistics of surprised and coincidence. Computational Linguistics, 19, 61-74.

Procedures Made a corpus of 1.5 million words with 9,565 abstracts from 33 applied linguistics journals published between 2001 and 2012 (Table 1) Analyzed the corpus with WordSmith Tools and created lists of most frequent words, key words and 3-, 4- and 5-word clusters (Tables 2 and 3)

Results See Tables 2 and 3

Implications This method of creating a discipline-specific vocabulary list can be used any field of study.