Towards the Establishment of an English Word List for Academic Purposes

Abstract

Nagy (1988) states that vocabulary is a prerequisite factor in comprehension. This study aimed at creatingan English Word List for Academic Purposes (EWLAP).The corpus of this study was compiled from a corpus containing 6479 pages of texts, 2,081,678 million tokens ( running words) and 63825 types (individual words), and 2615 word familiesfrom online resources. The created EWLAP included636word families, which accounted for 12%of the tokens in the EWLAPunder study.The high word frequency and the wide text coverage of this word list confirm that this word list plays an important role in English for Academic Purpose texts. From these findings, it can beconcluded that the EWLAP created in this study can serve as a guide for material and syllabus designers especially in designing course-books, in addition learning these words by learners can help them in better understanding of their texts, and development in their writing and reading.