Academic vocabulary in agriculture research articles: A corpus-based study

Recent critical views on the usefulness of a general academic vocabulary have heightened the relevance of developing discipline specific academic wordlists to meet the needs of non-native English writers who must read and publish articles in English. Using Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List, we set out to identify the academic words in a corpus of research articles of agriculture. A quantitative analysis provided a highly restricted list of words from the Academic Word List, 92 families. Qualitative observations revealed not only that some words had specific meanings and behaviours related to the genre and also probably to the field, but also that some words from the Academic Word List had technical meaning in our corpus. Furthermore, we observed that many words of general use had academic meaning in our corpus, and should probably be regarded as academic vocabulary. These findings suggest the need to produce field-specific academic word lists, which, in our view, should incorporate all frequent academic lexical items necessary for the expression of the rhetoric of the specific research area.