Creating and validating a corpus-based English academic word list for physics

Abstract

Abstract In this study a Physics Research Articles Word List (PRAWL) is built, which includes the most extensively used English vocabulary in the genre of physics research articles outside the most frequent general-purpose vocabulary. PRAWL can be of great use in English for Physics teaching and learning. This discipline-specific academic word list was produced from a corpus of 1.25 million running words, consisting of 200 physics research articles. PRAWL contains 929 words and has a 17.48% coverage in the corpus it was derived from. Together with 2,000 high-frequency general-purpose words, as well as words bearing no or minimal learning load, PRAWL reaches a coverage close to 95% in this corpus. We validate PRAWL in three independent corpora and also discuss the pedagogical implications and recommendations regarding its use. The list is intended for students of physics who do not have a command of English which is sufficiently adequate for reading research articles in it without outside support.