“The Academic vs. Subject Corpus: Development of
Criteria for the Teaching of ESP According to Lexical Needs in Spanish
Polytechnic Courses”
Alejandro
Curado Fuentes
Universidad de Extremadura, Spain
The aim of this paper is to offer the details gathered from the lexical
analysis of English texts read in Information Science related majors in
Spanish universities. In such a textual collection, lexical items are
arranged according to the notions of word frequency and range across text
types and genres, or within given subject fields and topics in the
Information science and technology disciplines. How strong these lexical
combinations are, based on their statistical M.I. (Mutual Information)
measurement, is also quite pertinent to our study. The degree of collocation
is thus assessed in the light of common coreness. That these patterns are
more or less consistent in our corpus is, indeed, a key characteristic to
value so that a reference with the total number of texts and running words
can be established. Finally, as the findings show that there exist
representative lexical items for a limited or reduced number of texts,
keywords must be explored. For the observation of results drawn according to
the three approaches mentioned - word frequency / range, collocations and
keywords - the focus is placed on both the text and the subject-matter. This
is essentially done to follow the priority of working with language and
content from the ESP (English for Specific Purposes) perspective. As a
consequence, a categorization is made regarding a specified kind of context
- e.g. text types.
As in the case of genre, the environments of text and discourse are of prime
importance for the situation of lexical items in the scope of academic
linguistic competence. Text types are approached in relation to how text is
organized and reflects coherence and cohesion, while the second setting -
genre - registers the writer's inclination and intentionality to produce
discourse for a community (e.g. academic). There are two other parameters -
subject and topic - on which the distribution of the lexical items of our
corpus is based. In their case, a framework based on content is provided,
and the findings yield the core lexis according to thematic / conceptual
fields.
a. Word frequency and range.
In this first division, the most frequent text type words are provided according to how recurrent they are across six sets of ten texts. These are grouped as follows:- 1. Definitions.
- 2. Descriptions.
- 3. Classifications.
- 4. Exemplifications.
- 5. Discussions.
- 6. Conclusions.