A corpus-based study of academic vocabulary in chemistry research articles

• We have analyzed a corpus of 1185 chemistry research article with 4 million words.
• We have developed a list of academic words for chemistry research articles.
• We have explored the frequency of GSL/AWL word families in chemistry research articles.
• The results indicate a need for developing domain-specific word lists.

This corpus-based study had two main aims: a) to develop a list of academic words used frequently in chemistry research articles (RAs) for EFL chemistry students, and b) to compare the word list with the distribution of high frequency words in Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) and West's (1953) General Service List (GSL) to determine their coverage within the RAs. We compiled and analyzed a corpus of 1185 chemistry RAs (hereafter CRAC) including 4 million words from 4 main chemistry subject areas (analytical, organic, inorganic, and physical/theoretical chemistry). We identified 1400 academic word families used with high frequency in the corpus. This constituted what we called the Chemistry Academic Word List (CAWL). Our analysis revealed that, of the 570 word families in AWL, 327 occurred frequently in CRAC and that this provided a coverage of 9.60% of the tokens in our corpus. Furthermore, a large number of word families (n = 390) found to be used frequently in CRAC had not been listed in GSL and AWL. This accounted for 27.85% of the word families in CAWL and more than 7% of the word tokens in the corpus. The implications of the findings for students with specialized vocabulary needs will be discussed.