Research On The Use Of Academic Vocabulary In Master's Degree Theses Of English Major

For non-native English speakers with academic purposes,academic vocabulary learning is a very necessary and efficient learning method that can help English users improve the basic skills necessary for their academic research,such as literature reading and academic writing.Coxhead's database of computer chemistry terminology has systematically established the Academic Vocabulary(AWL)(Coxhead,2000),which has become the basis and object of various researches on academic vocabulary in the past two decades.The 570 word family in AWL is considered to represent high-frequency academic vocabulary in a range of disciplines,and provides valuable references for academic vocabulary research and teaching in various disciplines,and stimulates the development of more professional academic vocabulary.The analysis of a large number of corpora by domestic and foreign scholars reveals the universality and importance of academic vocabulary in academics and research.As a reserve of future research talents,academic reading ability and writing ability are one of the main objectives of postgraduate training.This study has self-built three small corpora,sampled English master's thesis(C3 corpus),compared published English journal articles,divided into English native speakers and non-native authors academic papers(C1 and C2 corpus),and obtained AWL coverage.And further analysis of the master's thesis abstract,introduction,research methods,data analysis results and conclusions five parts of AWL coverage refinement analysis.The three research questions that this study attempts to answer are:(1)What is the use condition of academic vocabulary in those published academic papers which I have extracted 30 journal articles from authoritative English academic journals in the past five years,and among them,there were 15 journal articles written by native English speakers and 15 journal articles written by non-native speakers?(2)what is the use condition of academic vocabulary in 30 randomly selected graduate students of English majors?(3)Through the combination of quantitative research and qualitative research,what is the difference between the academic vocabulary of English majors and the academic vocabulary used in English academic journals? And what is the current status of the use of academic English for English majors?Through the comparative analysis of the data,it is found that:(1)The coverage of AWL in graduate papers in the sample is lower than the AWL coverage of Coxhead and Applied Linguistics.(2)The academic coverage of the abstract and introductory part of C3 is slightly higher than that of C1 and C2,while the coverage of C3's research methods,data analysis results and conclusions is lower than that of C1 and C2.Among them,the AWL of the research method part in C3 has the lowest coverage.(3)Comparing the 20 highest frequency words in the five parts of C1 and C2 and the 20 words in the highest frequency in C3,the high frequency vocabulary distribution of C3 is uneven,mainly in the first and second parts.(4)Compare the 60 high-frequency words in C1,C2,and C3 with the high-frequency phrases in Coxhead's Sub-list1,including the 60 most common words in AWL.We found that there are only 19 words in C1 C2.Only 21 words in C3 are consistent with the Coxhead project in Sub-list1.This reflects the fact that the discipline of C3 corpus is more specialized,so high-frequency vocabulary has the characteristics of high density and low change.