| Vocabulary acquisition has been acknowledged to be one of the most predominant problems at certain learning stage in acquiring a foreign language. For a learner who studies a foreign or second language for academic purposes, a set of special vocabulary - semi-technical vocabulary, appears particularly important, and problematic as well. Many reports have been made on the researches of semi-technical vocabularies in academic texts, either in a wide range of subject disciplines or in a single discipline, such as computer science, or economics. However, very few reports on the study of semi-technical vocabularies used in the field of medicine have been found. The present research was designed to study the distribution and frequency of this set of words in medical academic writings by conducting a corpus-based investigation on the semi-technical vocabularies in 50 medical research articles (RAs), and to study the frequency of semi-technical vocabularies in medical abstracts attached to RAs written in English by comparing 400 medical abstracts written by English academic writers and 75 medical abstracts written by Chinese academic writers.In our study, the 570 semi-technical word families of the most updated Coxhead's Academic Word List (AWL), 2000, the most popular and well recognized word list used in studies of semi-technical vocabularies, were employed as the basic word database in our study of the distribution and frequency of semi-technical vocabularies in medical academic writings and the comparative study of the frequency of semi-technical vocabularies in medical abstracts attached to RAs written in English. For data collection and analysis, a corpus-based research approach was utilized and three corpora of different sizes were created: a) Whole Paper Corpus contained 50 English RAs in medicine,with about 190,000 running words. The corpus was used in exploring the distribution and occurrence of the 570 AWL semi-technical word families, with an aim to locating frequently used semi-technical words in English for medical purpose (EMP); b) Abstract Corpus I contained 400 medical abstracts (with about 110,000 running words) written by English academic writers, which were randomly selected from one of the most representative and authoritative web database of medical abstracts published in English ?Medline; and c) Abstract Corpus II, the smallest of the three, contained 75 medical abstracts (with about 13,500 running words) written by Chinese academic writers, which were collected from the Journal of the Fourth Military Medical University (JFMMU), a core academic journal in Chinese medical science. These two abstract corpora were used in the comparative study of the frequency of semi-technical vocabularies in English medical abstracts attached to RAs written by native English academic writers and by Chinese academic writers. A self designed computer program was employed to process the data, count the frequencies of the semi-technical words in the corpora, and array the words alphabetically or according to frequencies in either an ascending or a descending order. The program could also produce concordance, so that the target words could be studied in contextual sentences extracted from the corpora.The major findings of our study are: a) We were the first to report that semi-technical vocabularies accounted for around 10% text coverage in English medical RAs, which was in accordance with the percentage reported by Coxhead (1998) in her studies on the text coverage of semi-technical vocabularies in academic writings in a wide range of scientific fields, but higher than the percentage of semi-technical vocabularies in medical academic text (6.72%) reported by Bobb and Horst (2002) in their study on the text coverage of semi-technical vocabularies in seven academic texts, each from a different scientific discipline; b) We found that 292 AWL word families out of the 570 AWL word families were frequently used in English medical RAs, and 150AWL semi-technical words that were frequently used in English med...
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