Understanding the most essential types of words for Physics undergraduate students

The field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) concerns not only English practitioners or EFL (English as a Foreign Language) but also disciplinary specification and the teaching faculty of disciplines of English learners, commonly known as subject-matter specialists because those specialists could also instruct or assist the EFL students in terms of proper usage of science and technological English. The participation of the specialists in ESP education is a growing area of both ESP and disciplinary research fields and has become a fast developing area of ESP research. Identifying content-area English academic language is essential for proper instruction of students. This study analyzed a well-known and widely used physics textbook for undergraduate students of first year, namely, Fundamentals of Physics by David Halliday, Robert Resnick, and Jearl Walker (8th edition), to understand the words of highest frequency used in this book. The high frequency words as well as a low frequency words in the textbook were assessed. In this study, investigation of the language functions based on the analysis of the corpus and identification of the words that construction the functions are the ultimate aim of this study. The free corpus software, AntWordProfiler, was employed for the analysis.