The nature of vocabulary in academic speech of hard and soft sciences

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.