Accounting Academic Word List (AAWL): A Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

The aim of this study was threefold: it aimed to develop a field-specific academic word list for accounting, to find the degree of coincidence between the word list and Coxhead's academic word list (AWL), and also to compare the occurrences of the most frequently used words in the list with six available word lists in different disciplines. A large corpus of accounting research articles was compiled and analyzed. We recognized 658 academic word families with the highest frequency in the corpus which we calledAccounting Academic Word List (AAWL). These 658-word families accounted for 10.16 % of the whole corpus. Further analysis indicated that out of these high-frequency word families we identified, only 354 coincided with those listed in AWL. Moreover, 50 most frequently used words in the list accounted for 3.98 % of the whole corpus. These words appeared in six available word lists in different disciplines with different degrees of occurrences which is a starting point for the development of a composite word list. Generally, this study confirmed the significance of subject-specificity of corpus-based word lists. The findings of this study suggest that AAWL can be used as a reference for the accounting community.