Developing a Corpus-Based Word List in Pharmacy Research ‎Articles: A Focus on Academic Culture

Abstract

The present corpus-based lexical study reports the development of a Pharmacy Academic Word List (PAWL); a list of the most frequent words from a corpus of 3,458,445 tokens made up of 800 most recent pharmacy texts including research articles, review articles, and short communications in four sub-disciplines of pharmacy. WordSmith (Scott, 2017) and AntWordProfiler (Anthony, 2014) were used to screen words based on frequency, range, dispersion, and specialized occurrence. The developed PAWL contains 750 word families covering 17.69% of the corpus under study. The findings of the current investigation confirm the necessity to compile domain-specific academic word lists to address the needs of non-native researchers and postgraduate students over various disciplines. Such a word list can function as a reference for an EAP lexical syllabus. Pedagogical implications are made for pharmacy researchers, postgraduate students, and material designers, who can use PAWL as a lexical repertoire to set their vocabulary learning/teaching goals.