นวลระหง เทพวิวัฒน์จิต. Frequency of Academic Words in Food Science Articles. Master's Degree(Applied Linguistics for English Language Teaching). King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi. KMUTT Library. : King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi, 2008.
Frequency of Academic Words in Food Science Articles
Abstract:
To be capable of reading English academic articles effectively, students should have an
adequate knowledge of vocabulary, especially the words which have important
functions in reading comprehension. These words should appear with high frequency in
a text but are not too general words. The Coxhead's Academic Word List (AWL)
contains 570 word families which are found to be of high frequency in a broad range of
academic texts and cover about 10% of academic texts of cross-disciplinary subjects.
This study was conducted to determine whether the AWL could be used as a basis for
selecting target words to prepare food science students for reading English food science
academic articles. If this could not be done, then it would be necessary to create a new
word list for this specific purpose.
For this study, a food science corpus was created from forty articles published in the
Journal of Food Science from 2002 to 2007. A concordancing software, "Simple
Concordance Program 4.05", was utilized to create a word list. The result showed that
the corpus consisted of 121,308 running words. 9,641 words were found to share their
basic forms of the word families with the AWL and accounted for approximately 8%
text coverage. These words could be grouped together into 438 word families and called
the food science academic word list (FS AWL). The relationship between the FS AWL
and the AWL was tested using Spearman's rank correlation coefficient. The result
showed that the two variables had a significant positive correlation at the 0.001 level.
Presumably, the AWL can be a suitable resource for preparing food science students to
read academic articles in their disciplines. The food science word list that resulted from
this study could also be applied to material design or vocabulary preparation for food
science students.