The Distribution of Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) in Undergraduate Theses: A Corpus Study

Authors

Fisma Universitas Hasanuddin
Abidin Pammu Universitas Hasanuddin
Ria Jubhari Universitas Hasanuddin

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.34050/elsjish.v4i1.13366

Keywords:

Academic Vocabulary, Theses, Corpus Study, non-native learners, academic writing

Abstract

This study is a corpus-based study that aims to find out the use of words in Gardner and Davies' (2014) Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) in Undergraduate Theses in the field of English Education. A 2.2 million-word called undergraduate theses corpus was created in this study. The corpus consists of 200 undergraduate theses compiled from 10 Universities in Indonesia. The result shows that AVL words account for 24.79% of the entire education undergraduate theses, which contained 557,658 running words. AVL contains 3,015 core academic words (lemmas). Based on word frequency criteria, this study found 573-word forms and 871 lemmas, which coverage 31.48% of the whole Gardner and Davies' AVL that occur at least 63 times in the entire corpus and the word has to occur at least five times in five universities. The finding shows that AVL is effective for the students in writing undergraduate theses. However some of the words that are closely related to the English Education field are not found in the AVL, therefore an attempt to develop a new academic vocabulary specific to the English Education field is needed.

References

Brezina, V., Weill-Tessier, P., & McEnery, A. (2020). #LancsBox v. 5.x. [software]. Available at: http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/lancsbox.

Chanasattru, S., & Tangkiengsirisin, S. (2017). The Word List Distribution in Social Science Research Articles. Arab World English Journal, 8 (4), 412–429. https://doi.org/10.24093/awej/vol8no4.28

Coxhead, Averil. (2000). A New Academic Word List. TESOL Quarterly, 34(2), 213. https://doi.org/10.2307/3587951

Csomay, E., & Prades, A. (2018). Academic vocabulary in ESL student papers: A corpus-based study Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 33,100–118. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2018.02.003

Davies, M. 2012. ‘Corpus of Contemporary American English (1990–2012),’available athttp://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.AccessedMarch 2020.

Gardner, D., & Davies, M. (2014). A new academic vocabulary list. Applied Linguistics,35 (3), 305–327. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amt015

It-ngam,T.,& Phoocharoensil, S. (2019). The development of science academic word list. Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics,8(3),657–667. https://doi.org/10.17509/ijal.v8i3.15269

Lei,L.,& Liu,D. (2016). A new medical academic word list: A corpus-based study with enhanced methodology. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 22,42–53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2016.01.008

Li,Y.,& Qian,D. (2010). Profiling the Academic Word List (AWL) in a financial corpus. System, 38 (3),402–411. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2010.06.015

Liu,J., & Han,L. (2015). English for Specific Purposes A corpus-based environmental academic word list building and its validity test. English for Specific Purposes, 39, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2015.03.001

Martinez,I.A., Beck,S.C., & Panza,C.B. (2009). Academic vocabulary in agriculture research articles : A corpus-based study. English for Specific Purposes, 28,183–198. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2009.04.003

Mozaffari, A., & Moini, R. (2014). Academic Words in Education Research Articles: A Corpus Study. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 98,1290–1296. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.03.545

Nation, P., & Webb, S. A. (2011). Researching and analyzing vocabulary. Boston, MA: Heinle, Cengage Learning.

Paquot,M. (2010). Academic Vocabulary in Learner Writing. Research in Corpus and Discourse. London: Continumm International Publishing Group.

Prihandoko, LA., et al. (2019). English language competence for tourism sector in supporting socio-economic development in Merauke: A Survey Study. IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science 343 (1), 012170

Prihantoro. (2016).The Influence of Students' L1 and Spoken English in English Writing: A Corpus-Based Research. Teflin Journal, 27 (2). 217-245.

Rahman, F. (2018). The Constraints of Foreign Learners in Reading English Literary Works: A Case Study at Hasanuddin University. Journal of Arts & Humanities (JAH), 7(2), 01–12.

Rahman, F. (2019). Meretas Jalan Publikasi Jurnal Internasional bagi PTN-PTS di Kota Watampone. Jurnal Ilmu Budaya, 7(1), 146–151.

Rahman, F., Amir, P., & Tammasse. (2019). Trends in Reading Literary Fiction in Print and Cyber Media by Undergraduate Students of Hasanuddin University. International Journal of Education and Practice, 7(2), 66–77.

Vongpumivitch,V., Huang,J.yu, & Chang,Y.C. (2009). Frequency analysis of the words in the Academic Word List (AWL) and non-AWL content words in applied linguistics research papers. EnglishforSpecificPurposes,28(1),33–41. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2008.08.003