Self-Built Corpus-Based Study Of The Use Of Academic Words In English Majors’ Writing

Academic words as one of the components of vocabulary learning and teaching are very important.In recent years,the studies of academic words and academic word list have attracted wide attention.However,studies on learners’ longitudinal development of academic words are to be further explored.In light of this gap,this study explores the academic words in English majors’ writing from Harbin Engineering University through quantitative and qualitative approach based on the self-built Diachronic Written English Learner Corpus(DWELC).Coxhead’s AWL is served as the criterion of the academic words scope in this study.Through the frequency retrieval software–––Range,this paper conducted a study on the longitudinal development of AWL in 6 semesters,the distribution of AWL word families,and the possible reasons affecting AWL use.The findings are as follow: 1)The overall coverage rate of AWL in DWELC is 3.93%;more than half of the word families in AWL are used in DWELC.2)With the growth of semesters,the frequency of AWL increases linearly,but there are fluctuations in the process of rising.3)The distribution of top 50 frequent word families is wide and mainly focuses in Sublist 1 and Sublist 2 of AWL;topic relevance is the main affecting factor of AWL frequency;4)The collocation of word families is single;“communicate with” and “contribute to” are overused in communicate-word family and contribute-word family.Based on the research findings,this paper also offers some suggestions for how to raise awareness of academic words and how to enhance academic words teaching.It is hoped that the study has pedagogical implications for vocabulary learning and teaching.