Journal
ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES
Volume 51, Issue -, Pages 69-83Publisher
PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.esp.2018.03.004
Keywords
Hard science; Soft science; Academic spoken discourse; Vocabulary; Word list; Corpora
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Little is known about the similarities and differences between the vocabulary in hard sciences (e.g., Maths, Engineering, Medicine) and soft-sciences (e.g., Business, Law, History), especially in spoken discourse. To address this gap, a Soft Science Spoken Word List (SSWL) was developed for second language learners of soft-sciences at English-medium universities. The list consists of the 1,964 most frequent and wide-ranging word-families in a 6.5 million word corpus of soft-science speech, which represents 12 subjects across two equally-sized sub-corpora. The list may allow learners to recognize 94%-97% of the words in academic speech of soft-sciences. A comparison of the SSWL with Dang's (2018) Hard Science Spoken Word List revealed that although the most frequent 3,000 words are important for comprehending academic speech of both soft- and hard-sciences, the value of these words in soft-sciences is greater than in hard-sciences. Pedagogical implications related to this nature of vocabulary in hard- and soft-science speech are provided. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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