A Corpus-based Study of Academic Vocabulary in Physiotherapy Research Articles

Scientific English is not homogenous but varies in relation to the contexts. As a contribution to the field, this study developed a list of academic words used frequently in physiotherapy research articles (RAs) and compared it with the distribution of high frequency words in Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) and West’s (1953) General Service (GSL). By analyzing a 1.7 million-word corpus, 1450 high frequent academic word families were identified and constituted the Physiotherapy Academic Word List (PAWL). The analysis showed that, of the 570 word families in AWL, 562 occurred frequently in physiotherapy research articles (RAs) and this provided a coverage of 11.51 of the tokens in the corpus. In addition, 406 word families (accounting for 28% of the word families in PAWL) found to be used frequently in PRAC had not been listed in GSL and AWL. The results indicate that AWL (Coxhead, 2000) is not entirely useful for physiotherapy learners because of the narrow coverage of some word families and the shortage of frequently used physiotherapy academic words. The established PAWL may serve as a guide for instructors in curriculum preparation, and for physiotherapy English learners in setting their vocabulary learning goals.