a corpus-based study of academic vocabulary in aviation research articles

The current corpus-based study investigated the lexical profile of aviation research articles the research had a twofold objective: first, to develop an academic word list used frequently in aviation research articles (ras) for efl aviation students, and second to compare the word list with the distribution of high frequency words in coxhead’s (2000 (academic word list (awl) and west’s (1953) general service list (gsl) to determine their coverage within the ras. to this end, a corpus of 50 aviation research articles with around 300 thousand words was analyzed. in order to create this word list, using multiple soft wares, a corpus of 10 thousand tokens was collected from aviation journal articles. our analysis revealed that, of the 570 word families in awl, 485 occurred frequently in arac providing coverage of 19.02% of the tokens in the corpus. out of 2000 most frequent words of gsl, only 991 word families occurred frequently in arac which provided coverage of 45.6%. furthermore, a large number of word families were found to be used frequently in arac had not been listed in gsl and awl, which accounted for 35.37% of the entire aviation research article corpus (arac). the findings suggest gsl and awl are very beneficial for learners in a specific field so they can learn both equally in order to obtain results that are approximately similar.