Technical vocabulary in specialised texts

By T. Chung, Paul Nation. Reading in a Foreign Language, 2003

224 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article describes two studies of technical vocabulary, one using an anatomy text and the other an applied linguistics text. Technical vocabulary was found by rating the words in the texts on a four step scale. It was found that technical vocabulary made up a very substantial proportion of both the different words and the running words in the texts, with one in every three running words in the anatomy text, and one in every five in the applied linguistics text being a technical word. A considerable number of technical words were from the first 2000 words of English and the Academic Word List. The article ends with suggestions for helping learners notice and learn technical vocabulary.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f4d1ab354341d093bdd15a4d3d10cba684053eee

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

1. Irina Elgort
2. Naeema Afzal
3. Paul Thompson
4. D. Townsend
5. Paul Nation
6. William Nagy
7. R. Waring
8. Ken Hyland

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

1. Paul Nation
2. Irina Elgort
3. Paul Thompson
4. William Nagy
5. R. Waring
6. Naeema Afzal
7. Ken Hyland
8. D. Townsend

In Language and Linguistics

1. Paul Thompson
2. Paul Nation
3. Irina Elgort
4. Naeema Afzal
5. D. Townsend
6. Ken Hyland
7. William Nagy
8. R. Waring

Citations in the corpus

• The Routledge Handbook of English for Academic Purposes (2016, background): “CEAP, thus, emerged as a coherent and effective critique of mainstream EAP during the 1990s, as Pennycook (1997, 1999) and Benesch (1993, 1996, 2001) made a highly persuasive case that EAP was a political field of practice, whether ‘accommodationist’ practitioners were aware of it or not.”
• Second language reading and incidental vocabulary learning (2020, background): “Chung & Nation (2003) found that 38% of the running words in an anatomy text and 17% of the words in an applied linguistics text were technical words.”
• A Study on Vocabulary-Learning Problems Encountered by BA English Majors at the University Level of Education (2019, background): “Chung and Nation (2003, 2004) observe that technical terms in textbooks are a main concern for the language learners.”
• Deliberate Learning and Vocabulary Acquisition in a Second Language (2011, background): “This is because the knowledge of technical vocabulary in a specialized area can contribute significantly to understanding discipline-specific communications (Chung & Nation, 2003; Nation, 2001; Ward, 1999).”
• Words as Tools: Learning Academic Vocabulary as Language Acquisition (2012, background): “Chung and Nation’s (2003) work on technical vocabulary provided guidelines for identifying technical words in the disciplines that may be targets for instruction.”