| Research Abstract |
There has been a growing interest in English for specific purposes (ESP), for English is increasingly becoming a lingua franca for international business and technology communications. In this study, ESP vocabulary specific to each domain or field of the 14 sub corpora such as commerce and applied science of the British National Corpus (BNC), which is one of the largest and most representative corpora of present English currently available, were identified and extracted by the application of nine statistical measures. Based on the extracted ESP vocabulary, e-learning vocabulary learning materials were developed.
The details are as follows :
1. Nine statistical measures (frequency, Dice coefficient, complimentary similarity measure, cosine, log-likelihood ratio, chi-square test, chi-square test with Yates correction, mutual information, and McNemar's test), which were developed by the investigators' preliminary studies, were applied to each of 14 sub corpora of the BNC to identify its dom
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ain-specific words.
2. The resulting 126 wordlists (14 sub corpora x 9 measures) were examined to show that each statistical measure extracted a different level of domain-specific words by its vocabulary level, grade level, and high school textbook vocabulary coverage. Specific measures produced level-specific words, i.e., frequency, Dice coefficient and complimentary similarity measure identified beginning-level words, cosine, log-likelihood ratio, chi-square test, and chi-square test with Yates correction produced intermediate-level words, and mutual information and McNemar's test created lists of advanced level words.
3. Finally, by using established statistical measures, spoken and written business vocabulary lists, and a spoken EAP (English for academic purposes) vocabulary list for a targeted proficiency level were created and developed into effective e-learning programs for Japanese college students for teaching business and EAP vocabulary. E-learning programs for teaching intermediate business words and EAP words developed in this research are available at the head investigators' homepage. Less
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