A Corpus-Based Study of Academic Vocabulary in Sociology Research Articles: Which Words Should a Teacher Concentrate on?

There have always been too many words in a new language to learn. Therefore, prioritizing important words over the others for learning, i.e., setting vocabulary-learning goals, is of paramount importance. One of the most effective means of prioritizing specific vocabulary items over other words to learn, is the expansion of a technical word list of the most common ones. This research aimed at reporting a corpus-based lexical study of the most frequently-used words within 8 sub-branches of sociology research articles. A technical word list for research articles in Sociology (STWL) was developed based on a corpus of 3,552,900 running words of 508 research articles in 8 subfields of the academic discipline of Sociology, which were compiled from reputable scholarly journals and analyzed via Range. Results indicated that with 1910 words STWL could cover 87.4% of the words running in the Sociology Technical Corpus (STC), while, based on the analysis, GSL-AWL had only 84.19% coverage over the same corpus. Therefore, STWL can be utilized as a vocabulary source for sociology learners and researchers to better understand the concepts of this field, as well as for ESP instructors and syllabus designers who are not familiar with the specialized terms and words of this field.