Academic Vocabulary: A Corpus Analysis Approach

Abstract

The study is a preliminary descriptive exploratory one to analyze a corpus of academic expository and argumentation essays (approximately 1,000 in total) written by students attending the EFL Program at the Lebanese American University in order to investigate the lexis they use. Specifically, the study attempts to describe the most frequent words in the essays in general and according to rhetorical mode. Furthermore, the study identifies frequency counts of ‘running words’ (content words: tokens) and different words (types) and then standardized ratios of types to tokens. Preliminary results indicate a high percentage of repetition of the same words in the essays irrespective of English course and essay rhetorical mode, with the word ‘the’ being the most frequent. Also, the type/token ratio is comparable in all analyzed essays indicating the limited presence of lexical variety. Implications for more focus on vocabulary instruction are made for the L2 teaching/learning situation..