Developing an Academic Word List for the Students of Health Information Management: A Corpus Study

Abstract

Importance of discipline specific vocabulary knowledge is well perceived. Despite the importance of the issue, there is a dearth of empirical research to unravel frequent academic vocabulary in the field of Health Information Management. To fill this research gap, the present study drew on a corpus of research articles and course books written in this field to underscore the concept of Academic Word List. To do so, a corpus of 2,264,981 running words analyzed by Range software package. In the process of research, we proposed a new discipline specific word list specially tailored for the students of health information management which can cover for 15.09% of all tokens in the corpus. This proportion of coverage is an improvement over previous academic word lists. Accordingly, it is hoped that the findings of the present study could contribute to students, teachers, material developers and researchers in this field of study.