Abstract:
The overarching goal of this study was to create a list of the most frequently occurring academic words in Food Science and Technology (FST). To this end, a 4,652,444-word corpus called Food Science and Technology Research Articles (FSTRA), which included 1,421 research articles (RAs) randomly selected from 38 journals across five sub-disciplines in FST, was developed. Frequency and range-based criteria were used to develop Food Science and Technology Academic Word list (FSTAWL). Word families had to occur in more than 19 journals, and they had to recur at least 134 times in the whole corpus. The computer programme RANGE was used to analyse the data. The results of frequency and range-based analysis showed that 1,090 academic words met the criteria of the study and constituted FSTAWL. The results also revealed that these words accounted for 13% of the coverage in the FSTRA. FSTAWL provides food science and technology non-native English learners who need to read a large number of RAs and to publish FST RAs in the English journals with a useful list of the most frequently used academic words, helping them to strengthen their academic reading and writing proficiency. The findings echo calls for creating more discipline-specific word lists to cater for the needs of specialized learner populations, providing implications for materials producers as well as explicit teaching of academic words.
Machine summary:
"A. student of TEFL, Islamic Azad University, Qazvin Branch Received: April 11, 2015; Accepted: December 23, 2015 Abstract The overarching goal of this study was to create a list of the most frequently occurring academic words in Food Science and Technology (FST).
FSTAWL provides food science and technology nonnative English learners who need to read a large number of RAs and to publish FST RAs in the English journals with a useful list of the most frequently used academic words, helping them to strengthen their academic reading and writing proficiency.
As the above review shows, following the groundbreaking work of Coxhead, other researchers set out to develop more disciplinespecific AWLs to help language learners in particular disciplines learn the most frequently occurring academic words.
The top 30 most frequent academic words in FSTAWL Headwords Range Frequency Use 38 27,880 Sample 38 19,064 High 38 16,008 Show 38 13,995 Difference 38 13,784 Product 38 12,862 Study 38 12,738 Increase 38 12,538 Temperature 38 11,935 Result 38 11,623 Analyze 38 11,005 Value 38 10,995 Effect 38 10,660 Water 38 10,077 Low 38 9,238 Active 38 8,869 Present 38 8,739 Significant 38 8,687 Time 38 8,626 Table 38 8,217 Concentrate 38 8,115 Add 38 8,040 Content 38 7,886 Treat 38 7,797 Process 38 7,606 Obtain 38 7,537 Extract 38 7,511 Determine 38 7,429 Food 38 7,227 Measure 38 7,227 As can be seen in Table 3, 616 (56."