A vocabulary study for enhancing learners’ experiences: English-language medical research abstracts

抄録

This study investigated the vocabulary features of medical abstracts from the perspective of enhancing learners’ vocabulary experiences in the disciplinary field. Our inquiry focused on the prevalence of the General Service List (GSL), the Academic Word List (AWL), the New General Service List (NGSL), and the New JACET List of 8000 Basic Words (hereafter referred to as “New JACET 8000”), as well as the most frequent lexical bundles within these texts. In a corpus of 456,641 tokens with 13,693 types, the repeated use of words and set phrases was found across multiple abstracts despite a high average type/token ratio in the individual texts. The coverages of the GSL and AWL, the NGSL, and the New JACET 8000 were about 80%. The ten highest frequency words accounted for 26% of the total word count with all ten words covered by the GSL; however, most of them were used in context-dependent sequences. The most frequently occurring lexical bundles were highly technical although individual words in the bundles were accessible. These findings may suggest the need for and provide insights into various strategies for raising learners’ awareness of the specialized lexical landscape of texts in the disciplinary field.