A Corpus-based Study On The Features Of Academic Vocabulary In Applied Linguistics Theses

As summaries of the work done during postgraduate study, master theses always reflect postgraduates'research and writing ability. A high-quality master thesis should be both cohesive in structure and logically well-organized. In addition, standard academic vocabulary is indispensible. Recent studies on academic vocabulary have been focused on the development of academic word lists, among which Coxhead's AWL is the most influential. However, it's generality across different disciplines has been challenged by many scholars. Researches to test its applicability to specific subjects have been conducted in the field of medicine, agriculture and engineering etc. Little attention has been paid to applied linguistics. Through analyzing a corpus of theses written by English-major masters, this paper probes into AWL's applicability to applied linguistics by way of exploring the characteristics of the academic vocabulary used by English-major masters.Using AWL, we set out to identify the academic words in a corpus consisting of 60 theses. With the aid of Wordsmith and Vocabprofiler, we found that the text coverage of AWL words accounted for 11.34% in the whole corpus and they distribute of slightly different percentage of coverage over the five sections of a paper. Referring to Coxhead's word selection criteria,363 word families were found to be frequently used by English majors in our study, most of which were included in Coxhead's first and second sublists. Furthermore, a comparison of our top 100 word families on our word list with that of Vongpumivitch et al's showed that students and scholars tend to employ different academic vocabulary in their writings. These findings, on one hand, suggest that AWL has a wide applicability to the subject of applied linguistics. English-major masters are proficient in managing this group of words. On the other hand, different preferences of the word families used by students and scholars highlight the importance of building a more specific word list to applied linguistics.What has been found in this study presents important pedagogical implications for teachers, especially in the way of curriculum designs. Meanwhile, the newly generated academic word list can be of great help for those students in the related field.