The knowledge on the features of the English varieties is essential to understand the differences and similarities of the varieties for second language teaching and learning, either for general proficiency (EGP) or English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classes. This paper demonstrates a corpus-based comparison of the lexical features between an ESP variety (Engineering English) and a General English (GE). Two corpora are used in the study; the Engineering English Corpus (EEC) acts as the representation of the specialized language, and the British National Corpus (BNC) as the General English (GE). The analyses are conducted by employing the WordList functions of a linguistic software -Wordsmith. Discussions on the differences (or similarities) of these two corpora include general statistics, text coverage and vocabulary size. The empirical findings in this study highlight the general lexical features of both corpora. The analyses verify that the Engineering English has less varied vocabulary, but higher text coverage than the GE; in other words, most of the words are used repeatedly throughout the EEC. Thus, this study further emphasizes the importance of corpus-based lexical investigations in providing empirical evidences for language description.Keywords: corpus; lexical features; specialized corpus; language description; ESP
INTRODUCTIONThe study of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) language features, in particular the lexical features, facilitates ESP teaching and learning. Peters and Fernández (2013) asserts that ESP is particularly different from General English (GE) or English for General Purposes (EGP), because ESP deals with lesser or limited number of varieties, text types and situations; in most cases, it will be one at a time. Bowker and Pearson (2002) claim that apart from the obvious attribute of an ESP, i.e. specialized vocabulary, another salient feature of an ESP is the distinctive ways of combining words and arranging information that are different from GE. This includes collocations and stylistic features (Sadeghi & Nobakht, 2014).In corpus-based studies, it has been established that there are words used repeatedly throughout a text, and these words, therefore, have high frequencies in a language. If a very large proportion of these high frequency words in a text can be identified, it allows a good degree of comprehension when reading a text. If that is the case, the common questions asked include how many words do a student need to know to be able to comprehend a text?, and do some disciplines use a greater range of different words?. These and other questions related to descriptions of word use in a language lead to answers, which are essential to ensure the effectiveness of second language teaching and learning, for either general proficiency (EGP) or English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classes. This study adopts a corpus-based comparison of the lexical features between an ESP variety (an Engineering English) by comparing it with the GE, which is represented by the British National Co...