A Corpus-Based Study On Academic Words Used In Dissertations Of Chinese English Postgraduates By Comparing AWL And AVL

Dissertations of postgraduates majoring in English usually reflect their abilities in scientific researches and writing. A good academic dissertation should not only include the tight structure and logic but also be formal, authentic in the usage of vocabularies, which need to give full expressions to technicality. It is a very important symbol for measuring the dissertations whether they have a good mastery or make a good use of the academic vocabularies in the fulfillment of academic dissertations of Chinese English majors. Based on AWL(Academic Word List) put forward by Coxhead and AVL(Academic Vocabulary List) created by Mark Davies, this paper focuses on the distribution or frequency in terms of academic vocabularies adopted by academic dissertations among the postgraduates majoring in English, and aims to promote AVL to be the up-to-date academic list and build a more concrete, more specific and more authentic academic word list for Chinese postgraduates majoring in English in the course of composing their academic dissertations. By making a comparative analysis of the two given academic word lists, we can figure out that AVL is much more advanced than AWL due to its wider foundation, more authentic materials and more logical extracting method. This paper built up a mini corpus, namely the EPAPC(English Majors’ Academic Papers Corpus), which consists of 60 papers drawn randomly from Wanfang Data. And statistical analysis will be conducted in terms of the coverage of those academic words appearing in EPAPC with the help of RANGE software and ANALYZE TEXT function in COCA. It indicates that AWL covers 11.4% in the EPAPC; however, the AVL covers up to 19%. Through the examination of EPAPC with respect to these selected academic dissertations of those national postgraduates majoring in English, we can find that AVL is much more precise than AWL indeed.Firstly, the author inputs the texts of EPAPC into RANGE for inspection and the results denote that 539 word families are used and cover 11.4%. The results signify that AWL is applicable to English and that English postgraduates have the ability to precisely use academic words in the process of writing academic dissertations and that their academic dissertations are of high technicality. Secondly, input 60 pieces of dissertations into ANALYZE TEXT to process and we can find the coverage of AVL in EPAPC is 19% in general. And the academic vocabularies are distributed in Range 1 and Range 2; however the coverage of AVL is much higher than AWL in EPAPC. On the other hand, on the basis of the comparison between AWL and AVL, the study further details the results to make a more representative academic vocabulary list for postgraduates majoring in English in the course of composing academic dissertations. Based on the contents of this paper, the author will focus on answering the following questions:1. What’s the difference between AWL and AVL in terms of the word families or lemmas?2. What’s coincidence of the top 60 and top 120 frequency words in two lists; and investigate whether the distribution of overlapping words is consistent;3. What’s the coverage of AWL and AVL in COCA and BNC respectively?4. What’s the coverage of AWL in EPAPC?5. What’s the coverage and distribution of AVL in EPAPC?Through analysis, it is found that:(1) English postgraduates in China tend to use certain sorts of words in their dissertations, which gives them insights into the importance of building a more representative academic word list in the course of English dissertation writing;(2) the study also enriches the contents of AWL and AVL, which is of great significance to vocabulary teaching, academic writing and vocabulary retrieval. In addition, the academic word list extracted from EPAPC in accordance with frequency of words chosen reflects the academic characteristics of most disciplines in English subject, which will do the students great help to refer to and make analysis in practice;(3) moreover, the specific academic word list generated and generalized from EPAPC can be used to detect the academic vocabulary usage among Chinese postgraduates majoring in English, and consequently helps them to inspect the accuracy and technicality of their academic dissertations with the aid of corpus-based method;(4) due to the limitations of the function ANALYZE TEXT, this paper also suggests to find an analysis tool for AVL just like RANGE for AWL to make the future researches more effective and efficient.