Abstract
English has increasingly become a global language of communication, trade and research. For ESL and EFL students, the need for English for academic purposes (EAP) skills—understanding academic textbooks and journal articles and attending or giving presentations—is also growing. Academic vocabulary development is essential in order to achieve a certain proficiency in EAP. Chujo and Utiyama (2004) and Utiyama et al. (2004) have established an easy-to-use tool using nine statistical measures to identify level-specific, domain-specific words (such as EAP) from a corpus. In this study, these measures were applied to a 1.63-million-word spoken educational/informative component of the British National Corpus composed of materials such as lectures, news commentaries and classroom interaction to produce nine word lists. We examined the top 500 most outstanding words of each list and confirmed that specific statistical measures produced level-specific lists of academic words. The selected spoken EAP words are grouped into three proficiency level sub-lists, which allow users to develop spoken EAP vocabulary lists on their own contexts.
