Corpus-based Creation of Tourism, Hotel, and Airline Business Word Lists

Abstract

A lack of technical vocabulary is a major problem for English for Specific Purposes (ESP) learners in a foreign setting. In this paper, we argue for using word lists to help learners expand their technical lexis repertoire. Therefore, we propose English word lists in three disciplines constructed from compiled corpora—the Tourism Business Word List (TBWL), the Hotel Business Word List (HBWL), and the Airline Business Word List (ABWL). The three word lists were derived from the vocabulary and technical terms appearing in the Tourism Business Corpus (TBC), the Hotel Business Corpus (HBC), and the Airline Business Corpus (ABC), which comprise language used in hospitality official websites, magazines, news, and work operation manuals. The corpora for ESP learners were carefully filtered through Filter Lexical Frequency, Filter Lexical Range, Filter Lexical Profiling, Filter Lexical Keyness, and via input and feedback from specialists and experts. Ultimately, the TBWL, HBWL, and ABWL were narrowed down to 378, 274, and 245 words, respectively, each of which was categorised into 13, 9, and 8 sub-word lists, respectively. The findings also revealed that the TBWL covered 7.76% of the TBC, the HBWL covered 7.67% of the HBC, and the ABWL covered 6.74% of the ABC.