Abstract:
The importance of vocabulary learning has been underlined in the field of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) because non-English majors who require reading English texts in their fields of study have to ex-pand their English vocabulary knowledge much more efficiently than ordinary ESL/EFL learners. Since academic vocabulary instruction in Iranian universities is realized through the use of General English (GE) textbooks, the present study pursued a dual purpose of evaluating Iranian engineering undergradu-ates’ knowledge of academic vocabulary, as well as conducting a comparative corpus analysis of the aca-demic vocabulary content of GE textbooks, electrical/electronic engineering Master’s Entrance Examina-tions, and authentic electrical and electronic engineering texts. The participants were 520 engineering stu-dents from ten universities. The corpora under study comprised a total of 1,180,000 running words. The results revealed an inadequacy of academic vocabulary knowledge among Iranian engineering undergrad-uates, as well as the fact that GE textbooks for engineering students do not have sufficient coverage of academic vocabulary as compared to M.S. examinations and authentic electronic engineering corpora. There was also insufficient correspondence between academic words in M.A. entrance exams and the au-thentic texts.
Machine summary:
S. Entrance Examinations Parviz Maftoon1; Aris Hakhverdian2* 1 Department of Foreign languages, Islamic Azad University, Science and Research Branch, Tehran, Iran 2 Department of Foreign languages, Islamic Azad University, Science and Research Branch, Tehran, Iran Received: 10 February , 2013 Accepted: 15 May, 2014 Abstract The importance of vocabulary learning has been underlined in the field of English for Academic Purposes(EAP) because non-English majors who require reading English texts in their fields of study have to ex- pand their English vocabulary knowledge much more efficiently than ordinary ESL/EFL learners.
Since academic vocabulary instruction in Iranian universities is realized through the use of General English (GE) textbooks, the present study pursued a dual purpose of evaluating Iranian engineering undergradu- ates’ knowledge of academic vocabulary, as well as conducting a comparative corpus analysis of the aca- demic vocabulary content of GE textbooks, electrical/electronic engineering Master’s Entrance Examina- tions, and authentic electrical and electronic engineering texts.
S. entrance Examinations, electrical engineering corpus INTRODUCTION Several researchers have underlined the signifi- cance of vocabulary knowledge in the field of English for academic purposes (EAP) (Cobb, 1999; Hyland, 2006; Read, 2000; Sutrasyah, Na- tion, & Kennedy, 1994).
METHOD Participants The participants in the present study were engi- neering undergraduates, who took the Vocabu- lary Levels Test (VLT) (Schmitt, Schmitt, &Clapham, 2001) for the evaluation of their aca- demic vocabulary knowledge, and consisted of a total of 520 (315 male, 205 female) students of computer (82), electronics (81), agriculture (27), software and process (55), hardware (52), me- chanics(67),textile (105) andchemistry (51)from 10 different (3 state and 7 Azad) universities.