Establishment of a Medical Academic Word List

This paper reports a corpus-based lexical study of the most frequently used medical academic vocabulary in medical research articles (RAs). A Medical Academic Word List (MAWL), a word list of the most frequently used medical academic words in medical RAs, was compiled from a corpus containing 1 093 011 running words of medical RAs from online resources. The established MAWL contains 623 word families, which accounts for 12.24% of the tokens in the medical RAs under study. The high word frequency and the wide text coverage of medical academic vocabulary throughout medical RAs confirm that medical academic vocabulary plays an important role in medical RAs. The MAWL established in this study may serve as a guide for instructors in curriculum preparation, especially in designing course-books of medical academic vocabulary, and for medical English learners in setting their vocabulary learning goals of reasonable size during a particular phase of English language learning.