HIGH FREQUENCY ENGLISH COMMON CORE VOCABULARY FOR THAI UNIVERSITY ENGINEERING STUDENTS
Keywords:
High Frequency Vocabulary, English Common Core Vocabulary, Thai University Engineering Students, the General Service List, the Academic Word ListAbstract
The research purposes were (1) to investigate how often and how many of the first 1000 word families including function words, the second 1000 word families of the General Service List (GSL) (West, 1953) and 570 word families of the Academic Word List (AWL) (Coxhead, 2000) are encountered in nine highly used English engineering texts; (2) to create general word lists and academic word lists from the nine English engineering text-based corpus based on the most frequent 2000 word families of the GSL and 570 word families of the AWL; (3) to determine if the distributions of the parts of speech of the content words in the academic word list compiled from the nine English engineering text-based corpus significantly differ from one another in the nine English engineering texts; and (4) to develop a high frequency English common core vocabulary word list for Thai university engineering students in reading English engineering texts. The data were compiled from 9 engineering e-Books selected from 5 basic engineering subjects: Engineering Drawing, Engineering Mechanics, Engineering Materials, Computer Programming, and Electrical Engineering, totaling 1,589,065 tokens. The data were analyzed by the Range program, and classified into general and academic word family lists. The relationship between distributions of the parts of speech of the content words in the academic word list compiled and types of engineering texts was examined using X2 test and percentages. The findings were discussed based on Quirk & Greenbaum’s grammar (1976). The results show that the first 1000 word families, the second 1000 word families of the GSL and 570 word families of the AWL covered 65.4%, 5.6%, and 8.6% respectively; X2 equals 5,404.24; p-value is.0001. The findings revealed that there were significant differences in the parts of speech of the content words in the academic word list compiled from the nine text-based English engineering corpora, consisting of 60% nouns, 20% verbs, 17% adjectives, and 3% adverbs. The research revealed that high frequency English vocabulary occurs in the English engineering texts.
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