A High Frequency Word List for Political Sciences

Abstract

Recent research favors specific academic wordlists over a general academic wordlist for preparing university students to read and publish academic papers in English. Although researchers have developed wordlists for various disciplines, some academic fields do not enjoy a well-developed technical wordlist. The present study aimed at developing and evaluating a specific academic wordlist for political sciences. A 3.5-million-word corpus of political sciences papers created and analyzed in order to develop the Politics Academic Word List (PAWL). The list included 2000 word families which were selected across and beyond the BNC/COCA wordlist based on frequency and range criteria. The word families enjoying an aggregate frequency of a hundred or more in the corpus and a minimum frequency of 10 in at least four of the seven sub-corpora were incorporated into the wordlist. The PAWL accounted for over 88% of the running words in the Politics Academic Corpus (PAC) and outperformed the list of General Service List (GSL) plus Academic Word List (AWL) words in coverage by 3 percent, despite containing 556 fewer word families. The study corroborates the value of a subject specific wordlist as a more fruitful source for academic vocabulary learning. Pedagogical implications and suggestions for further research are discussed.

Keywords

• political sciences
• academic word list
• english for specific purposes