Semi-Technical Vocabulary Issues in ESP: An OCHA Approach and Study Tools

Abstract
This paper discusses issues related to the teaching of semi-technical vocabulary,
presents tools and techniques for analyzing such terms, and offers examples of how the
analyses can aid applications in English for Specific Purposes. As an example, we will
use legal vocabulary from a corpus of US Constitutional Cases which was analyzed for
word meanings, grammatical features, collocational patterns and frequently occurring
specific discoursal features. The theoretical foundations of this research lie in applied
linguistics and corpus linguistics, which are currently being used to prepare general
English-Japanese dictionaries.

Law dictionaries offer definitions of legal technical words and their historical
backgrounds, but unfortunately lack examples of how these legal words should be used
in context. Furthermore, there are no explanations as to how words with general senses
are used with legal senses in legal documents. This can be a problem for non-native
English-speaking law students, leading to difficulties in comprehending cases written in
English because they frequently cannot fully understand the meaning of semi-technical
legal words. The highly technical terms, on the other hand, tend to be easier to master.
Here we present an approach to identifying differences in the usage of words in general
and specific contexts as well as to find collocations common to field-specific corpora.
This work lays the basis for developing effective teaching materials, and the model
developed can be applicable to other fields of language for specific/special purposes.

232 words (reduce to under 200)

Keywords
applied linguistics, English for Specific Purposes, corpus linguistics, dictionaries, legal
English