Corpus-Based Approach to Generate a Word List for Food Service

Abstract

Learners preparing to work in the food service industry should be equipped with food service terminology to enhance their communicative potential. The purpose of this study was to create a Food Service Word List (FSWL) to assist L2 learners of English in English for Specific Purposes classrooms. The Food Service Corpus  (FSC) with a size of 1,871,271 running words was created by collecting data from four websites relevant to the food service industry, consisting of www.bbc.co.uk/food/cuisines, www.tasteatlas.com, www.escape.com.au and www.edition.cnn.com. The procedure of generating the FSWL comprised three stages: keyword analysis was used to extract the first 814 words with the highest LL values; lexical profiling was used to select words allocated outside the referent word lists; and three experts in the food service industry were asked to give their viewpoints based on their experiences. The results produced the FSWL containing 261 words with a coverage of 8.64% of the FSC. The curated word list can enhance the food service vocabulary range of learners and prepare them for more effective communication in a food service career.