On the problem of compiling a professional English-language minimum dictionary

Abstract

The purpose of the study: to work out a professional lexical minimum for students of the 1st and 2nd-year students of the Faculty of Chemistry of Lomonosov Moscow State University. The dictionary should meet all the criteria defined in the English language program and perform the following functions: differentiating, teaching, systematizing and normative. Procedure and methods. The review of educational literature for students of the Faculty of Chemistry conducted by the authors from the point of view of teaching a foreign language for special purposes confirms the fact that neither academic vocabulary nor terminology is provided adequately. With the help of AntConc and AntWordProfiler concordance programs, a corpus of teaching aids used by teachers of the department was compiled and analyzed; the selected list of words was minimized according to the developed selection criteria. Results: a lexical minimum for students of Chemistry department was compiled on the basis of the texts from 14 most frequently used textbooks of the Department of English. The lexical minimum contains 1123 lexemes, covering academic vocabulary and chemical terminology in the main part, as well as 99 most common words of the English language. The practical significance of the study is determined by the developed methodology for compiling an educational mini thesaurus in chemistry. Taking into consideration that special attention is paid to the study of specialized vocabulary in the framework of teaching a foreign language for special purposes, the efforts of the teachers should be directed to the selection and ordering of lexical material, since it is communication skills that allow graduates to be competitive in the labor market.

Keywords

• lexical minimum
• mini thesaurus
• english
• specialized vocabulary
• selection criteria for lexical units