Academic Vocabulary Use in Doctoral Theses: A Corpus-Based Lexical Analysis of Academic Word List (AWL) in Major Scientific Disciplinary Groups

Abstract

Since the development of academic word list (AWL) by Coxhead (2000), multiple studies have attempted to investigate its effectiveness and relevance of the included academic vocabulary in the texts or corpora of various academic fields, disciplines, subjects and also in multiple academic genres and registers. Similarly, this study also aims at investigating the text coverage of Coxhead's (2000) AWL in Pakistani doctoral theses of two major scientific disciplinary groups (Biological & health sciences as well as Physical sciences); furthermore the study also analyses the frequency of the AWL word families to extract the most frequent word families in the theses texts. In order to achieve this goal, a pre-built corpus of Pakistani doctoral theses (PAKDTh) (Aziz, 2016) comprises of 200 doctoral theses from two major scientific disciplinary groups was used as textual data. Using concordance software AntConc version 3.4.4 (Anthony, 2016), computer-driven data analysis revealed that in total 8.76% (496839 words) of the text in Pakistani doctoral thesis corpus is covered by the AWL words. Further distributing the analysis per sub-lists, shows that the first three sub-lists of AWL accounted for almost 57% of the whole text coverage. An attempt was made to further analyze the AWL text coverage by considering the frequency of occurrences in terms of word families. The findings showed that among 570-word families of Coxhead's (2000) AWL, 550-word families with the sum of 96.49% are found to occur more than 10 times in PAKDTh corpus, which are taken as word families used in the corpus. This study concludes that Coxhead's (2000) AWL is proved effective for the writing of theses. On the basis of the findings, further possible academic implications are discussed in detail.

The word profile of a Global Online Course for English language teachers: A corpus-based research project

“…Table 3 and Figure 1 reveal that there is a gradual decline in the usage of the AWL in terms of tokens from the given sublists becoming less frequent. This finding is in line with what other researchers found in the literature, that earlier sublists in the AWL are used more compared to later ones (for example, see Pathan et, al., 2018)…”

“…Based on their results, the authors advocate that this approach is more impactful than the commonly accepted, exclude-the-high-frequency-words approach. Moreover, when AWL is tested in new contexts, such as Pathan et al's (2018) study on Ph.D. theses in Pakistan, the percentage of the coverage of the AWL is similar to what Coxhead (2000) generally proposed.…”

Semantic Preference, Prosody and Distribution of Synonymous Adjectives in COCA

“…McDonough, Neumann and Hubert-Smith carried out study on how accurately EAP students use academic words (McDonough, Neumann & Hubert-Smith, 2018). Others explored extent to which teachers used the Academic Vocabulary List working with their learners (Banister, 2016) or its use in doctoral thesis (Pathan, Memon, Memon, Shah, Magsi, 2018 (Gardner & Davies, 2014). It is the most current, comprehensive, precise list of core academic vocabulary in existence today and it is useful in completing a great number of academic tasks: analysing the level of text difficulty and richness, assessing the student's vocabulary knowledge and growth, determining the vocabulary components of academic curricula.…”

The Implementation of Academic Word List and Its Implication to the Improvement of EFL Students’ Academic Writing Quality

“…Related to the practical solution that has been provided by some scholars, they are various in terms of number. Among the practical solutions, the implementation of an academic word list is valued by some scholars as a beneficial basis that can be expanded in developing the writing skill of the students (Antes & Beck, 2020;Choo et al, 2017;Khany & Kalantari, 2021;Pathan et al, 2018).…”