医学英语高频词汇

Establishment of a Medical Academic Word List q

Jing Wang,Shao-lan Liang,Guang-chun Ge *

Department of Foreign Languages,Fourth Military Medical University,Xi’an,China

Abstract

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 cor-pus containing 1093011running words of medical RAs from online resources.The established MAWL contains 623word 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 med-ical 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.

Ó2008The American University.Published by Elsevier Ltd.All rights reserved.

1.Introduction

The acquisition of vocabulary has long been considered to be a crucial component of learning a language (Coady,Magoto,Hubbard,Graney,&Mokhtari,1993;Nation,2001)because the breadth and depth of a student’s vocabulary will have a direct influence upon the descriptiveness,accuracy and quality of his or her writing (Read,1998).Nagy (1988)also claimed that vocabulary is a major prerequisite and causative factor in compre-hension.The dramatically large number of English words,however,is a learning goal far

0889-4906/$34.00Ó2008The American University.Published by Elsevier Ltd.All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.esp.2008.05.003

q The article is co-authored equally.

*

Corresponding author.Tel.:+862984774475;fax:+862983234516.E-mail address:guangcge@ (G.-c.Ge).

Available online at

English for Specific Purposes 27(2008)

442–458

/locate/esp

NGLISH FOR S PECIFIC P

J.Wang et al./English for Specific Purposes27(2008)442–458443 beyond the reaches of second language learners and even beyond the reaches of most native speakers.

Fortunately,all words are not equally important in different stages of learning.Nation’s (2001)division of vocabulary into four levels—high frequency words,academic vocabu-lary,technical vocabulary and low frequency words—indicates that some words deserve more attention and effort than others in different phases of language learning or for differ-ent purposes.According to Nation and Waring(1997),it is generally agreed that the beginners of English learning should focus on thefirst2000most frequently occurring word families of English in the General Service List(GSL)(West,1953),while for inter-mediate or advanced learners who usually study English for academic purposes,the com-mand of these GSL words may no longer be their major concern and the priority of their vocabulary acquisition may be shifted to lower frequency vocabulary.In academic set-tings,ESP students do not see these technical terms as a problem because these terms are usually the focus of the discussion in the classroom or are glossed in the textbook (Strevens,1973).The vocabulary that ESP students have most difficulty with is known, in ESP jargon,as non-subject-specific semi-technical vocabulary or academic vocabulary (Li&Pemberton,1994;Shaw,1991;Thurstun&Candlin,1998).

1.1.Academic vocabulary

Academic vocabulary,which is also called sub-technical vocabulary(Cowan,1974)or semi-technical vocabulary(Farrell,1990),is viewed as‘‘formal,context-independent words with a high frequency and/or wide range of occurrence across scientific disciplines, not usually found in basic general English courses;words with high frequency across sci-entific disciplines”(Farrell,1990,p.11).The high frequency occurrence of academic words in academic text has been confirmed by some researchers.Sutarsyah,Nation,and Ken-nedy(1994)reported that academic vocabulary accounted for8.4%of the tokens in the Learned and Scientific sections of the LOB and Wellington corpora,and for8.7%of the tokens in economics texts.Coxhead(2000)reported that the academic vocabulary in her Academic Word List covered10%of the tokens in her3500000running word aca-demic corpus.Santos’research(2000)revealed that roughly16%of the words in his text-book samples across different disciplines were academic words.This high coverage of academic words in the academic texts has far exceeded the5%ratio of the unknown to the known comprehension threshold suggested by Laufer(1988),who has pointed out that a learner has to know95%of the words in a text to ensure reasonable comprehension of the text because the ratio of unknown to known words over5%is not sufficient to allow reasonably successful guessing of the meaning of the unknown words.In addition,Kuehn (1996)observed that knowledge of academic words differentiated academically well-pre-pared from under-prepared college students from all backgrounds.Thefindings from these studies clearly indicate that EAP learners,without sufficient knowledge of academic vocabulary,cannot deal effectively with reading materials for various types of academic tasks they are supposed to fulfill(Laufer&Nation,1999).However,proficient use of aca-demic vocabulary is one of the most challenging tasks in ESP students’word expansion. Anderson and Freebody(1981)found that academic words were the words most often identified as unknown by her students in academic texts.Based on his study,Farrell (1990)reported that the lack of knowledge was partly the result of the assumption of some