Material Development and English for Academic Purposes Word Lists; a Reductionist Approach

Abstract

Nagy (1988) states that vocabulary is a prerequisite factor in comprehension. Drawing upon a reductionist approach and having in mind the prospects for material development, this study aimed at creating an English for Academic Purposes Word List (EAPWL). 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 families from online resources. The created EAPWL included 636 word families, which accounted for 12%of the tokens in the EAPWL under 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 and hence can be a justified resource for material development in the field. From these findings, it can be concluded that the EAPWL created in this study can serve as a guide for material developers 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 comprehension.