A Corpus Analysis of English Vocabulary Input in Course Materials Used for Engineering Students

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to analyze vocabulary input in English for Engineering courses in three areas: 1) proportion of general service vocabularies based on the general service list (GSL) 2) proportion of academic words based on the academic word list (AWL) and 3) most frequently used academic words in a corpus. The textbooks were collected from universities running English for Engineering courses: 1) Thammasart University (TU) 2) Rangsit University (RSU) 3) Rajamangala University of Technology (RMUT). The lexical analysis software applied in the study was WordSmith. The finding revealed that the majority (around 80%) of every text comprised of words from the GSL. Regarding academic words, they accounted for 5-6 % in each text approximately. Finally, the study found that 363 academic words were used in English for Engineering textbooks.