English for Specific Purposes 37 (2015) 27–38

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

English for Specific Purposes

journal homepage: http://ees.elsevier.com/esp/default.asp

A nursing academic word list

Ming-Nuan Yang*
General Education Center, Chang Gung University of Science and Technology, Taoyuan 313, Taiwan

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: This corpus-based lexical study aims to explore the most frequently-used nursing aca-
Available online demic vocabulary across different sub-disciplines in the nursing field. A 1,006,934-word
corpus called the Nursing Research Articles Corpus (hereafter NRAC), which contains
Keywords: 252 English nursing research articles from online resources, was established for this study.
Academic word list A Nursing Academic Word List containing the most frequently-used nursing words in
Nursing academic word list
nursing research articles, was developed from the corpus. A frequency and range-based
English for Nursing Purposes
nursing academic word list including 676 word families, which accounts for approxi-
English for Academic Purposes
mately 13.64% of the coverage in the NRAC under study, was produced to provide a useful
academic word pool for non-native English learners who need to read and publish nursing
articles in English. The findings suggest that it is necessary to generate field-specific ac-
ademic word lists for EFL nursing students to strengthen their academic reading and
writing proficiency. Pedagogical implications are made for English for Nursing Purposes
instructors, English for Academic Purposes researchers, material designers and nursing
graduate students.
Ó 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

1. Introduction

Since knowledge of vocabulary has a direct influence on language learners’ reading and writing proficiency, the acquisition
of vocabulary is considered to be the most important component of learning a foreign language (Nation, 2001). Due to the
increasing demand for teaching EFL learners in their specialized study fields, great attention has recently been paid to the
specialized vocabulary used in academic texts. Academic vocabulary, which plays a significant role in academic texts, consists
of words with a high frequency and a wide range of occurrence across scientific disciplines, which are not usually found in
basic general English texts (Farrell, 1990). Some researchers claim that the majority of non-native English speakers find it hard
to acquire academic vocabulary, especially if the objective is to acquire a high level of literacy in the target language (Cobb &
Horst, 2004). Graduate students in Taiwan are required to write a thesis/dissertation including English and Chinese abstracts
as part of their graduation, irrespective of their chosen field of specialization. In addition, some universities even require their
graduate students to publish research articles in international journals or study abroad for one year. Hence, the university in
which the author teaches offers an academic English course to improve nursing graduate students’ skills with regard to
writing English abstracts for academic papers. Although these students have learned English for at least seven years in an EFL
context, their English proficiency level is still at a low-to-intermediate level. Moreover, the findings from two recent studies
show that nursing students in the EFL context have little success in reading textbooks and academic research articles in

* Tel.: þ886 0919 857 657.

E-mail address: jessica@gw.cgust.edu.tw.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2014.05.003
0889-4906/Ó 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
28 M.-N. Yang / English for Specific Purposes 37 (2015) 27–38

English (Huang, 2010; Yang, 2011). Thus, it can be assumed that nursing graduate students find it difficult to read and write
academic papers.
Although a number of word lists of academic words have been established in other disciplines, no list has exclusively
targeted the nursing field. Since it is considered to be both important and essential to create a nursing academic word list,
which is useful for nursing graduate students in all sub-disciplines, this study aims to establish such a list to serve as a guide
for English for Specific Purposes (ESP) instructors and material designers in English for Nursing purposes (ENP) curriculum
preparation and English for Academic Purposes (EAP) textbook design, to provide further evidence for EAP researchers who
are interested in producing field-specific academic word lists and to facilitate nursing students’ acquisition of academic
vocabulary. An academic word list targeted exclusively for nursing students can be taught and directly studied in the same
way as the words from West’s (1953) General Service List of English words (GSL) and Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List
(AWL). A nursing academic word list may play an important role in setting vocabulary goals for language courses, guiding
learners in their independent study, and informing course designers in designing material, selecting texts and developing
learning activities. For teachers, the findings of the study can be incorporated into EAP writing and reading courses. They can
incorporate the word-forms and word families found in the study into their academic reading course by directing students’
attention to these words and requiring students to use these words in their writing. Materials designers can develop academic
English textbooks specifically designed to teach nursing academic vocabulary, and nursing research article reading and
writing, which in turn can effectively improve nursing students’ academic reading and writing proficiency. Finally, for re-
searchers in applied linguistics and EAP, the findings of the study may serve as a useful basis for further research into the
establishment of field-specific academic vocabulary. The study could be of special significance to researchers using nursing
academic vocabulary to examine the rhetorical functions served by these academic words.

1.1. Academic vocabulary

According to Nation (2001), words in English academic writing can be classified into four categories, namely, high-
frequency words, academic words, technical words and low-frequency words. High-frequency words are English words
that are frequently used in basic conversation, reading and writing. Many word lists based on word frequency have been
developed for students to learn essential and important words. The most widely used collection of high frequency words is
West’s (1953) General Service List of English words (GSL). West (1953) used a variety of criteria to select the words from a
corpus of five million, including frequency, ease of learning, coverage of useful concepts and stylistic level. The GSL contains
2,000 word families. Although the GSL has been criticized for its age and size, it accounts for 90% coverage in fiction texts, 75%
of nonfiction texts and approximately 80% of the running words in academic texts. These word families are valuable for ESL
and EFL learners to concentrate on because they provide learners with realistic goals to learn vocabulary. Language learners
have numerous opportunities for exposure to these words.
Academic words, not usually found in basic general English texts, refer to words that account for a relatively high pro-
portion of running words in all academic texts. According to Thurstun and Candlin (1998), this set of vocabulary is most
problematic for learners to acquire because learners are generally not as familiar with it as they are with technical vocabulary
in their own field. The Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000), which is the most widely cited academic word list in the
literature, consists of 570 words families that are not in the most frequent 2,000 words of English. Since the list occurs
reasonably frequently over a wide range of academic texts, it is regarded as a useful learning tool for learners with academic
purposes (Coxhead & Nation, 2001).
Technical words are those used in specialized topics, fields or disciplines. These words are reasonably common in a certain
subject area but not so common elsewhere. They differ from subject area to subject area and cover about 5% of the running
words in an academic text. Technical words include a variety of types which range from words that do not usually occur in
other subject areas (defecate, dialysis, diastole, edema, ezcema and peritoneal) to those that are formally like high-frequency
words but which have specialized meanings (dressing, complaint, terminal, discharge, stool) when used in nursing (Nation,
2001).
Low-frequency words are rarely-used terms that are not extensively dispersed and occur in low frequency. Some words
may only occur once or twice and may be encountered only occasionally; yet, this is the biggest group of words in any field.
Low-frequency words cover around 5% of the running words in an academic text. Low-frequency words include all the words
that are proper names, words that users rarely meet in their use of the language, not high-frequency words, and technical
words for other subject areas (Nation, 2001). Nation (2001) claims that “one person’s technical vocabulary is another person’s
low-frequency words,” which shows the fluctuation of low frequency words (p. 20).
These four different categories of words play different roles at different stages of language learning. Based on their learning
purposes and stages, learners can decide which category they need most. For example, Laufer (1992) argues that, if L2 readers
want to successfully comprehend academic research articles, they need to know 95% (about 3,000) of the words contained in
academic reading texts. In other words, they need to be familiar with both West’s (1953) GSL and Coxhead’s (2000) Academic
Word List (AWL) vocabulary, the most recently compiled word list containing 570 word families. Coxhead and Nation (2001)
claim that AWL vocabulary is common in academic texts of different genres and fields, and is considered to have the
advantage of being accessible to language teachers, unlike technical vocabulary. Learners may, in fact, find the technical
vocabulary in their own field more familiar than academic vocabulary. However, previous studies have found that academic
vocabulary in academic texts is most problematic for the majority of non-native English speakers to acquire because learners
 M.-N. Yang / English for Specific Purposes 37 (2015) 27–38 29

are usually familiar with high-frequency words and technical words in their field (Chung & Nation, 2003; Cobb & Horst, 2004;
Coxhead & Nation, 2001; Shaw, 1991; Thurstun & Candlin, 1998). Therefore, helping non-native English learners to acquire so-
called problematic words has become an important issue for EAP researchers and teachers.

1.2. Studies on the development of academic vocabulary lists

Academic word lists are thought to provide the necessary vocabulary to enhance proficiency in academic contexts
(Coxhead & Nation, 2001). Many studies on academic vocabulary have developed some very useful discipline-crossing ac-
ademic word lists. Xue and Nation (1984) developed the University Word List (UWL) by combining four earlier-compiled
word lists established by Campion and Elley (1971), Praninskas (1972), Lynn (1973), and Ghadessy (1979). The UWL con-
tains 836 word families that are not included in the 2,000 word families of the GSL (West, 1953). According to Nation (1990),
the UWL accounts for approximately 8% of the words in typical academic texts. Coxhead’s (2000) AWL, the most recently
compiled word list containing 570 word families, has become the main representative list of academic vocabulary due to its
high coverage in academic texts. Coxhead (2000) established a corpus of 3.5 million running words selected from different
academic journals and university textbooks in four main areas: the arts, commerce, law and natural science. The AWL list,
containing 3,112 individual items, excludes words in the most frequent 2,000 word families in the English language and
West’s (1953) GSL. In Coxhead’s view, using range as the first criterion for word selection can help minimize any possible bias
from word repetition within longer texts and topic-related texts. Therefore, range should be prioritized over frequency to
avoid bias which may be generated by longer texts and topic-related words. For a word to be included in the AWL, it has to
occur 10 times or more in each of the four main areas (the arts, commerce, law and natural science) of the corpus, in at least 15
of the 28 subject areas, and more than 100 times in the entire corpus. The AWL is divided into 10 sub-lists based on frequency.
The first nine sub-lists consist of 60 word families each, while the tenth sub-list contains 30 word families. The 570 word
families in the AWL account for approximately 10.0% of the tokens in Coxhead’s corpus. Its coverage in the four disciplines is
9.3% in the arts, 12% in commerce, 9.4% in law, and 9.1% in science. However, Coxhead found that the AWL covered only 1.4% of
a similar-sized corpus of fiction, which suggests that the AWL is more relevant for learners with an academic purpose. Also, a
combination of the AWL and the 2,000 word families in the GSL cover up to 90% of the words in the corpus, which implies that
a learner will find only one unknown word in every 10 running words (Coxhead & Nation, 2001). Due to its fewer word
families, higher text coverage, and more consistent word selection criteria, the AWL is the most widely cited academic word
list across different disciplines and it has revolutionized EAP learningdmany course books explicitly reference the AWL as a
source for their vocabulary choices. Therefore, Coxhead (2000) claimed that the AWL is essential for students who are pursing
higher education, irrespective of their chosen field of specialization.
Since the AWL is viewed as the most common used academic words in academic texts, some researchers have explored the
coverage of the AWL vocabulary in certain fields, such as agriculture (Martínez, Beck, & Panza, 2009), applied linguistics
(Chung & Nation, 2003; Huang, 2007; Vongpumivitch, Huang, & Chang, 2009), business (Chen, Hu, & Ho, 2009), and medicine
(Chen & Ge, 2007). Of these studies, Vongpumivitch et al. (2009) found that the AWL words accounted for 11.17% of their
Applied Linguistics Research Articles Corpus (ALC). They also found that 475 AWL and 128 non-AWL word forms were used
more than 50 times in the ALC and at least five times across the five journals. Their findings demonstrated the potential
strength of building a field-specific academic list, which would enable learners to better understand the published academic
texts they need to read. In their study of the frequency and distribution of Coxhead’s AWL word families in medical research
articles, Chen and Ge (2007) found that the AWL words accounted for 10.07% of their medical corpus. Martínez et al. (2009)
compared the most frequent items in their corpus with Hyland and Tse’s (2007) findings. The results showed a low coinci-
dence of only three items between these two corpora. They also compared the 20 most frequent words in the four article
sections of their corpus with the 20 most frequent words in Chen and Ge’s (2007) medical corpus. They found there was a low
coincidence in the Introduction (25%) and Methods (30%) sections. They argued that due to preferred forms, meanings and
collocational patterns in different field, the lexical differences that exist across distinct disciplines may be greater than the
similarities. Their findings lend support to the argument that the more specific the field is, the more specific word items the
field uses. Chen and Ge (2007) suggested a medical academic word list of the most frequently-used medical academic vo-
cabulary in medical science could be developed to make the medical academic word list complete.
In order to understand whether Coxhead’s AWL vocabulary has the same value across different disciplines and fields,
Hyland and Tse (2007) conducted a study to find out the distribution and frequency of the AWL in their corpus. They offered
corpus-based evidence to demonstrate that AWL items vary widely across disciplines and fields. The same word can present
apparent differences in “frequency, range, preferred meanings and forms, and the collocation patterns” (Hyland & Tse, 2007, p.
238). They reported that, while the AWL covers a similar proportion to Coxhead’s proposed coverage in their total corpus, the
distribution is not the same for all disciplines in the corpus. Although the combined GSL and the AWL covered 85% of the
overall corpus, there were differences of coverage when the distribution was analyzed into sub-fields. Hyland and Tse (2007)
argued that the words contained in the AWL are not of equal value to all students, and some words may be no use to them at
all. For example, the words are likely to be most useful to students in computer science, where 16% of them are covered by the
list, and least useful to students in biology, with only 6.2% coverage. Hyland and Tse concluded that each subject discipline has
its own way of explaining experience and its own form of argumentation; therefore, a more restricted, discipline-based word
list is necessary for each different discipline.
30 M.-N. Yang / English for Specific Purposes 37 (2015) 27–38

As illustrated by previous studies, the AWL can be regarded as the most widely cited academic word list across different
fields. Although Nation (2001, p.12) claimed Coxhead’s AWL was “the best list,” more recently, some researchers have focused
on the establishment of an academic word list in a specific field. Lam (2001) investigated academic words used in the field of
computer science. She found that academic vocabulary was semantically different from the same vocabulary when it
appeared in general texts. She suggested that such words should be presented as a glossary of academic vocabulary with
information of the frequency of occurrences based on a specialized corpus. Mudraya (2006) developed an academic word list
of 1,200 word families for engineering students. The items on the list represented the vocabulary that engineering students
were likely to encounter in engineering textbooks, regardless of their field of specialization. More recently, Wang, Liang, and
Ge (2008) developed a Medical Academic Word List (MAWL) of 623 word families, which accounted for 12.24% of the tokens
in the medical research articles being studied. Only 342 (54.9%) of the 623 word families in the MAWL coincided with the 570
word families in the AWL. They argued that a more restricted discipline-based word list is necessary for each discipline.
Martínez et al. (2009) also argued that it is necessary to produce field-specific and discipline-based academic word lists,
which should incorporate all the frequent academic lexical items necessary for the expression of the rhetoric of the specific
research area.
Researchers have demonstrated that each subject discipline has its own way of explaining experience, its own forms of
argumentation (Bloor, 1998; Holmes, 1997; Hyland, 2001; Samraj, 2002). Martínez et al. (2009) also claimed that each field
has its own preferred forms, meanings and collocational patterns. The specific items may contribute to the shaping of the
disciplines and to the particular ways of representing experience. Accordingly, each field could establish its own academic
word list. Moreover, according to Hyland and Tse (2007), the best way to prepare students for their academic studies is to
provide them with an understanding of the features of the discourses they will encounter in their particular courses. An
academic word list exclusively for nursing students can be taught and directly studied in the same way as the words from the
GSL. A nursing academic word list can also play an important role in helping EFL nursing students learn academic English
more effectively. Therefore, the study aimed to establish a Nursing Academic Word List (NAWL) of the most frequently-used
nursing academic vocabulary across different sub-disciplines in nursing. To guide the present study, a Nursing Research
Articles Corpus (NRAC), a collection of journal articles in the field of nursing, was established to address the following
research questions:

1. Which lexical items occur frequently in all nursing sub-disciplines but are not among the first 2,000 words of English as
given in the GSL (West, 1953)?
2. To what extent are the AWL word-forms and the MAWL (Wang et al., 2008) word-forms used in the Nursing Research
Articles Corpus?

2. Methodology

A nursing corpus containing 1,006,934 running words from 252 nursing research articles was established as a database for
the current study to determine the most frequently-used nursing academic vocabulary in the nursing research articles. The
list of all articles that comprise the corpus is provided online in the Supplementary Materials.

2.1. Data collection

A Nursing Research Articles Corpus (hereafter NRAC) was specifically compiled for the study. The relevant research articles
were obtained from the electronic nursing journals with full text, accessed from the library of the researcher’s university. To
guarantee the representativeness of the samples chosen, the researcher consulted three experienced nursing professors who
have taught and conducted studies in nursing for more than 10 years at the researcher’s university. Based on the charac-
teristics of the sub-disciplines in nursing, they helped the researcher to organize these sub-disciplines of nursing into 21
subject areas. As a result, the articles adopted in the corpus were selected from the 21 subject areas, which are shown in
Table 1 below.
A four-step selection was followed to choose the sample nursing research articles for the corpus. Firstly, only research
articles focusing on empirical studies, written in the identifiable Introduction, Method, Result, and Discussion sections, were
included in the NRAC. Secondly, first authors of the articles chosen had to be native English researchers and also be affiliated
with an institution in countries where English is spoken as the first language (Wood, 2001). Thirdly, the research articles
chosen had to have been published between 1995 and 2011. Fourthly, the length of the chosen articles must be longer than
2,000 running words and shorter than 10,000 running words. After this four-step selection, 12 articles were selected from
each subject area and a total of 252 articles were chosen for the NRAC. The average length of a research article in the NRAC is
3,996 running words (sd ¼ 1234.12), the shortest containing 2,134 running words and the longest containing 8,013 running
words. The articles were collected in their electronic version with their reference lists, appendices, captions, footnotes, and
acknowledgments removed (Swales, 1990). The corpus represents a genre, experimental research articles, and a field, that is,
nursing. The results show that the NRAC contains 1,006,934 running words.
 M.-N. Yang / English for Specific Purposes 37 (2015) 27–38 31

Table 1
Subject areas of nursing.

No. Subject area No. Subject area

1. Cardiology 12. Orthopedics
2. Dermatology 13. Pediatrics & Child Health
3. Endocrinology, Metabolism & Diabetes 14. Proctology
4. ENT 15. Pulmonary & Respiratory
5. Gastroenterology & Hepatology 16. Psychiatry & Mental Health
6. Infectious Diseases 17. Public Health and Health Policy
7. Neurology 18. Rehabilitation
8. Obstetrics 19. Renal
9. Gynecology 20. Surgery & Plastic Surgery
10. Oncology 21. Urology
11. Ophthalmology

2.2. Data analysis and processing

The study aims to determine which nursing academic words are frequently used in nursing research articles. To answer
the research questions, quantitative analyses were conducted using the computer software Range (Heatly, Nation, & Coxhead,
2002), which is available as a free downloadable zip file at http://www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/staff/paul-nation/nation_aspx, for the
lexical analysis and profiling. Running the program on the corpus generated TYPE and FAMILY output, which were saved into
Excel to facilitate further data analysis. The output provided information on the overall coverage of the three lists (the first and
second thousand words of the GSL and the AWL) in the corpus and the words not included in the three lists.
The author set three criteria to create a nursing academic word list, which included range, frequency, and word family.
Coxhead (2000) ranked range as the first criterion and frequency as the second when she established her Academic Word List
(AWL). She argued that a word count mainly based on frequency would have been biased by longer texts and topic-related
words. Hence, Coxhead’s suggestion that frequency be considered secondary to range was followed when developing
frequently-used nursing academic words in this study. Only words which occurred in 11 or more of the 21 subject areas were
included. As for the frequency criterion, word forms had to occur at least 33 times in the entire NRAC because the number of
running words in the NRAC corpus was only about one third of those in Coxhead’s corpus (3,500,000), a third of Coxhead’s
100 times. The study also compared the word families in the NAWL with the word families in Wang et al.’s study of the MAWL
(2008), which were selected from a corpus about one third of the size of Coxhead’s corpus. To make a consistent selection, the
author followed Coxhead’s (2000) and Wang et al.’s (2008) criteria. Only word forms that occurred at least 33 times in the
NRAC were selected for the candidate world list.
Thirdly, the word families included had to be outside the first 2,000 most frequently-occurring word families of English.
“Word” in the nursing academic list is defined as a word family, which is the basic word plus its inflected forms and
transparent derivations, as defined by Bauer and Nation’s (1993) scale, for example:

indicate: indicated, indicates, indicating, indication, indications, indicative, indicator, indicators

According to Coxhead (2000, p. 218), “comprehending regularly inflected or derived members of a family does not require
much more effort by learners if they know the base word and if they have control of basic word-building processes”. Many
researchers also argue that learners who know one family member can easily master all its inflected and derived forms
(Hyland & Tse, 2007; Nation, 1990; Read, 2000). The notion of a word family is appropriate for the development of a nursing
academic word list. Following these three criteria, the academic words were counted and listed. If there was any uncertainty
about any of the criteria-fulfilling word families, one experienced nursing teacher and one native-speaking English teacher
were consulted. They helped the author to make a decision on whether the word families in question should be included or
excluded from the finalized word list. The finalized list was called the Nursing Academic Word List (NAWL) and is listed in the
Appendix. The words appearing in the Appendix are not the headwords, but the most frequently occurring words of the

Table 2
Coverage of 676 NAWL word families in the NRAC.

NAWL word families Frequency Coverage of the NRAC

1–100 67,924 6.75%
101–200 26,056 2.59%
201–300 16,600 1.65%
301–400 10,924 1.08%
401–500 7,572 0.75%
501–600 5,456 0.54%
601–676 2,867 0.28%
Total 137,399 13.64%
32 M.-N. Yang / English for Specific Purposes 37 (2015) 27–38

families. The NAWL was compared with 570 word families in the AWL. The NAWL was also compared with the MAWL in Wang
et al.’s study (2008). Word families in the AWL are bold-faced and word families in the MAWL are italicized in the Appendix.

3. Results

3.1. Establishment of a Nursing Academic Word List

This study focused on the most frequently-used nursing academic vocabulary in nursing research articles. For the
members of a word family to be included in the NAWL, they had to occur in at least 11 subject areas, that is, half of the 21
subject areas in the corpus, at least 33 times in the corpus and outside the first 2,000 most frequently-occurring word families
of English. According to the word selection criteria, 676 word families were chosen and formed the NAWL (see Appendix).
These appeared a total of 137,399 times and accounted for 13.64% of the frequency in the nursing research articles. Table 2
presents the frequency and coverage of the 676 NAWL word families that occurred in the entire NRAC. The occurrences of
the top 100 word-families accounted for 6.75%. In other words, the remaining 101–676 word families made up 6.89% of the
whole NRAC. It can be seen that the NAWL vocabulary made up a very large proportion of the running text (13.64%), higher
than that reported by Coxhead (2000) in the whole of her cross-disciplinary academic corpus (10%). The figure is also higher
than the AWL coverage in Coxhead’s four sub-corpora of commerce (12%), the arts (9.3%), law (9.4%) and science (9.1%) and
10.07% in medical research as found in Chen and Ge (2007). It is interesting to note that, compared with the coverage of the
Medical Academic Word List (MAWL) in the medical corpus, which is a field-specific word list, our NAWL coverage in the
nursing corpus is even higher than the MAWL coverage (12.24%) reported in Wang et al.’s (2008) medical corpus.
Table 3 presents the distribution of the nursing academic words in the nursing corpus. The words in the NAWL occurred in
a wide range of the texts in the NRAC. Of the 676 words in the list, 205 (30.33%) of word families covered all the 21 subject
areas, 61 (9.02%) covered 20 subject areas, 44 (6.51%) covered 19 subject areas and 49 (7.25%) covered 18 areas. More than half
of the words (359) in the NAWL vocabulary occurred in 18 or more of the 21 subject areas. The average text coverage of the
NAWL was 17.21% of the subject areas of the total words in the 21 subject areas studied.
The author made a detailed analysis of the NAWL word distribution in the corpus in order to acquire a clearer picture of the
academic words used in the nursing corpus. Table 4 presents the frequency distribution of the NAWL in the NARC. Among the
676 NAWL word families, 52 word families (7.68%) occurred more than 499 times in the NRAC (about once every 2,016 words).
315 word families (46.53%) appeared more than 99 times, but fewer than 500 times. The other 309 NAWL word families
(45.79%) appeared fewer than 100 times, but more than 32 times in the NARC. The high-frequency of these word families
shows the vital role played by academic vocabulary in nursing academic texts.
The following passage is a paragraph randomly selected from one nursing research article in the NRAC (Stephens, Hagler, &
Clark, 2011). The NAWL words in the passage are bold-faced. 27 of the total 204 words in the passage were included in the
NAWL. The NAWL text coverage in the passage is 13.24%, which is similar to the findings of the study.
A keyword search of major data bases such as CINAHL, MEDLINE and the Cochrane Library was conducted. National
guidelines were reviewed and a systematic, critical appraisal of the literature was conducted. The evidence sup-
ported ABI as a cost effective and reliable tool for PAD diagnosis in primary care. Relying solely on the clinical
expertise and patients’ report of symptoms was uniformly described as unreliable. It was reported that as many as 20–
50% of patients are asymptomatic, 40–50% have atypical leg pain, 10–35% present with classic claudication, and only 1–
2% present with critical limb ischemia. Sentinel study, “PAD PARTNERS” was one of the largest PAD studies conducted
specific to ABI screening in primary care. The study involved 350 primary care providers and 7,000 patients. The
PARTNERS study authors found that patients 50–69 with one risk factor such as diabetes and smoking were risk for
PAD. All patients > 70 were considered an at-risk population regardless of risk factors. In this study, a 29% increase in
diagnosis was noted when using ABI screening. Smaller scale studies, Rotterdam and CHARISMA also led to

Table 3
Subject area coverage of 676 words in the NAWL.

Subject area covered Number of word families Percentage Accumulative percentage

21 205 30.33% 30.33%
20 61 9.02% 39.35%
19 44 6.51% 45.86%
18 49 7.25% 53.11%
17 42 6.21% 59.32%
16 42 6.21% 65.53%
15 45 6.66% 72.19%
14 44 6.51% 78.70%
13 45 6.66% 85.36%
12 41 6.06% 91.42%
11 58 8.58% 100%
Total 676 100%
 M.-N. Yang / English for Specific Purposes 37 (2015) 27–38 33

Table 4
NAWL word distribution in the NRAC.

Times of occurrence Number of words Percentage Accumulative percentage

>500 52 7.69 7.69
400–499 26 3.85 11.54
300–399 43 6.36 17.90
200–299 80 11.83 29.73
100–99 166 24.56 54.29
50–99 211 31.21 85.50
33–49 98 14.50 100
Total 676 100

recommending ABI as a screening tool. Eleven of the studies reviewed provided data supportive of training staff to
perform ABI in primary care practice (Stephens et al., 2011, p. 153).

3.2. AWL and MAWL word forms used in the Nursing Research Articles Corpus

When comparing the word families of the NAWL with those of other word lists, it is possible to determine the differences
based on specificity. Firstly, the 676 word families in the NAWL were compared with 570 word families in the AWL. The words
that coincided with the words in the AWL are bold-faced (see Appendix). Only 378 (55.92%) of the 676 word families in the
NAWL overlapped with the 570 word families in the AWL, which is consistent with Wang et al.’s (2008) findings (54.9%). In
other words, 192 (33.69%) of all the AWL families have a very low occurrence in the nursing corpus and so have a low chance of
being encountered by nursing students. Although the AWL, a general academic word list, and the most widely cited academic
word list across different fields, plays an important role in the nursing research articles, it is far from complete in explaining
forms of argumentation for the nursing field. The difference between the AWL and the NAWL shows that the shaping of the
disciplines and the particular ways of representing experience require a discipline-based lexical repertoire. Table 5 illustrates
the frequency and the coverage of the 378 most frequently-used AWL word-families in the entire NRAC. The total frequency
counts of these 378 word families were 89,938, which was 8.93% of the whole NRAC. The occurrences of the top 100 word-
families accounted for 5.82%. In other words, the remaining 101–378 word families made up 3.11% of the whole NRAC.
Although the AWL vocabulary made up 8.93% of the running text in the NRAC, it was lower than that reported by Coxhead
(2000) for the whole of her cross-disciplinary academic corpus (10%). The figure (8.93%) was also lower than the AWL
coverage in Coxhead’s four sub-corpora of commerce (12%), the arts (9.3%), law (9.4%) and science (9.1%). It is interesting to
note that this is even lower than the AWL coverage reported in Chen and Ge’s (2007) medical corpus (10.07%). Although
medicine and nursing both belong to the field of health sciences, the different coverage shows that it is necessary to develop a
field-specific academic word list in the nursing field.
Table 6 shows the coverage of the 378 (55.92%) AWL word families, which were identified in the NRAC, in each of Cox-
head’s sub-lists. With respect to the frequent word families used in the NRAC, eight word families in Coxhead’s sub-list 1 and
six word families in Coxhead’s sub-list 2 do not appear in the NRAC. Moreover, Table 6 presents the percentage of the 378 AWL
word families from the NARC, distributed over Coxhead’s sub-lists 1–10. Most of the 378 AWL word families in the NARC
occurred in Coxhead’s sub-lists 1, 2, 3 and 4 (54.35%), but the AWL word families from sub-lists 5, 6, 7 and 8 accounted for
36.68% of the 378 AWL word families, while those from sub-lists 9 and 10 made up only 8.97%. The word families from sub-
lists 1, 2, 3 and 4 greatly exceeded those from sub-lists 5 to 10. This distribution tendency demonstrates that the 378 word
families consisted of more components from Coxhead’s sub-lists 1, 2, 3 and 4.
The study also compared the 676 word families in the NAWL with the 623 word families in Wang et al.’s (2008) MAWL. The
words that coincide with the words in the MAWL are shown in italics. (see Appendix for the word families occurring in both
lists). The overlap between the NAWL and the MAWL was 429 (63.46%) words families occurring in both, with 52 items more
than those that occur in both the NAWL and the AWL. Thus, it is possible to suggest that, at least in these two sciences, nursing
and medicine, there is a greater similarity of academic vocabulary. The high coincidence between the NAWL and the MAWL
seems to be partly the result of the subject areas they cover in the corpora. The results show that the more specificity the two
corpora share, the more identical academic words they have in common. Although both nursing and medical science are in
the field of health sciences, they do not cover the same disciplines or have the same research practices. According to Hyland
and Tse (2007), different research practices, and different ways of seeing the world are associated with different forms of
argument, preferred forms of expression and specialized uses of lexis. The difference between the NAWL and the MAWL
might be attributed to the shaping of the disciplines and the particular ways of representing experience, their own forms of
argumentation and rhetoric functions in these two disciplines. Our results lend support to the argument that a more
restricted, discipline-based word list is necessary for each discipline (Hyland & Tse, 2007).
Table 7 shows the frequency and the coverage of the MAWL that occurred in the whole NRAC. The total 623 MAWL word
families appeared 105,644 times and accounted for 10.64% of the frequency in the NRAC. Although the coverage of MAWL in
the NRAC is higher than the coverage of AWL in the NRAC, it is lower than the coverage of the NAWL in the NRAC and that of
the MAWL (12.024%) in Wang et al.’s (2008) study. The overlap between the NAWL and the MAWL is 63.46%, with 429 word
34 M.-N. Yang / English for Specific Purposes 37 (2015) 27–38

Table 5
Coverage of the 378 most frequently-used AWL word families in the NAWL.

NAWL Word Families Frequency Coverage of the NRAC

1–100 58,593 5.82%
101–200 18,807 1.87%
201–300 8,799 0.87%
301–378 3,739 0.37%
Total 89,938 8.93%

Table 6
Coverage of the 378 AWL word-families that occurred in the NRAC in each of Coxhead’s sub-lists.

AWL sub-list 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Total

1–100 31 27 16 10 6 2 3 4 0 1 100
101–200 13 16 15 20 13 7 5 6 5 1 100
201–300 5 7 13 11 14 14 13 11 7 5 100
300–378 4 4 8 8 8 9 13 12 10 2 78
Total 52 54 52 49 41 32 34 33 22 9 378

Table 7
Coverage of the 623 MAWL word families in the NRAC.

MAWL word families Frequency Coverage of the NRAC Accumulative percentage

1–100 64,367 6.39% 6.39%
101–200 21,878 2.17% 8.56%
201–300 11,810 1.17% 9.73%
301–400 6,521 0.65% 10.38%
401–429 1,068 0.10% 10.48%
430–623 1,580 0.16% 10.64%
Total 107,224 10.64%

families occurring in both. The total frequency counts of the 429 MAWL word families were 105,644 (10.48%), while that of the
rest 194 MAWL word families were 1,580 (0.16%). The NAWL has a higher coverage (13.64%) of academic texts than the MAWL
does. The nursing students could learn the word families in the MAWL but might rarely or never encounter some of them in
nursing academic texts. The NAWL includes 676 word families that constitute a specialized vocabulary with good coverage of
academic texts, irrespective of the nursing sub-discipline area.
Figure 1 shows the coverage of the AWL, MAWL, and NAWL word families in the whole NRAC. The NAWL word families had
about 13.64% coverage of the running words in the corpus. The coverage of the NAWL is higher than the 10.64% of the MAWL
and the 8.93% of the AWL word families in the nursing corpus. In terms of coverage, the NAWL word families have higher
coverage than the AWL as well as the MAWL word lists in the nursing corpus. Moreover, it is worth noting that the coverage of
the NAWL in the nursing corpus is also higher than that of the MAWL in Wang et al.’s (2008) medical corpus, which accounted
for 12.24% of the tokens in the medical research articles. This is not a criticism of the AWL or the MAWL but does serve to
highlight the high coverage given by the NAWL. The findings of our study are similar to the findings of previous studies, a
more restricted, discipline-based word list is necessary for each discipline (Hyland & Tse, 2007; Martínez et al., 2009; Wang
et al., 2008).
The 120 top word families in our corpus were then compared with those in Coxhead’s Sub-lists 1 and 2 and the 120 most
frequent word families in Wang et al.’s (2008) MAWL. The NAWL words that also occurred in Coxhead’s sub-lists 1 and 2 are

Figure 1. Text coverage of the AWL, MAWL and NAWL in the NRAC.
 M.-N. Yang / English for Specific Purposes 37 (2015) 27–38 35

bold-faced and the NAWL words that were also the 120 top word families in the MAWL are italicized. Within the first 120
families, 51 (42.5%) word families coincided with the 120 most frequent families in the MAWL (see Table 8). Fifty (41.67%)
word families coincided with Coxhead’s items, with one item less than the number of coinciding items in the MAWL. Again,
the results show that the NAWL, MAWL and AWL do not use the exact same 120 most frequent word families. Moreover, the
results show that less than 50% of the most frequently-used word families are shared by both the NAWL and the MAWL even
though they both belong to the health science field.

4. Conclusion

In this study the author produced a nursing academic word list from a nursing corpus, and compared the list with other
academic word lists. Different from many previous studies that mainly involved academic words used across a number of
scientific fields, this study specifically focused on the academic words used in one particular field, that is, nursing. The NRAC
established for the study is representative, balanced, and genre-specific (only research articles are represented) and relevant
to nursing students’ needs (reading and writing research articles for graduate study). The NAWL is the only list of academic
words exclusively targeted for the nursing field. This 676-word list represents a relatively useful target for nursing students
who have to improve their reading comprehension of academic texts and their academic writing skills. The NAWL also gives
excellent coverage of a wide variety of nursing academic research articles. Out of the 570 AWL items, only 378 (55.92%) were
found to be frequently used in the nursing research articles. Out of the 623 MAWL items, only 429 (63.46%) were frequently
used in the nursing research articles. The coverage of the NAWL in the nursing research articles is 13.64%, while that of the
MAWL in the nursing corpus is 10.64%. Therefore, the NAWL provides more text coverage than the MAWL.
This study explores the nursing academic vocabulary used in research articles. In order to establish a more useful vo-
cabulary database for nursing students, the development of a much wider corpus covering various genres of nursing is

Table 8
120 most frequent academic word families in the NRAC corpus.

Number Headword Number Headword Number Headword

1 participate 2 significant 3 data
4 research 5 clinic 6 analyze
7 assess 8 score 9 respond
10 symptom 11 intervene 12 vary
13 cancer 14 surgery 15 factor
16 indicate 17 identify 18 method
19 function 20 perceive 21 individual
22 outcome 23 item 24 process
25 medical 26 physical 27 infant
28 proceed 29 range 30 consist
31 therapy 32 interview 33 diagnose
34 statistic 35 survey 36 previous
37 area 38 questionnaire 39 period
40 medication 41 require 42 similar
43 specific 44 evaluate 45 evident
46 professional 47 demonstrate 48 positive
49 potential 50 predict 51 involve
52 investigate 53 conduct 54 affect
55 impact 56 community 57 issue
58 role 59 criteria 60 status
61 adolescent 62 major 63 pregnant
64 emotion 65 stress 66 occur
67 design 68 strategy 69 discharge
70 approach 71 obtain 72 primary
73 focus 74 intense 75 depress
76 reside 77 chronic 78 appropriate
79 available 80 conclude 81 dose
82 infect 83 subscale 84 define
85 rely 86 correlate 87 muscle
88 benefit 89 category 90 initial
91 random 92 caregiver 93 select
94 rehabilitation 95 baseline 96 percent
97 client 98 normal 99 physician
100 assist 101 mental 102 overall
103 facilitate 104 cope 105 diabetes
106 milligram 107 transplant 108 midwife
109 referral 110 site 111 visual
112 adjust 113 intake 114 exclude
115 adult 116 enhance 117 fatigue
118 access 119 drug 120 efficacy

Note. Word families in the MAWL are italicized and word families in the AWL are bold-faced.
36 M.-N. Yang / English for Specific Purposes 37 (2015) 27–38

recommended for future studies. Moreover, Martínez et al. (2009) pointed out that a list based on semantic and pragmatic
criteria would be more useful than lists based on frequency criteria. A nursing academic word list based on semantic and
pragmatic criteria could be established to determine whether or not differences exist in the two word lists.

4.1. Pedagogical implications

The results of this study have generated a number of important implications for nursing graduate students, EAP and ENP
teachers, material designers and researchers. Firstly, the NAWL, which not only has high frequency but also a wide range, can
serve as a reference for developing teaching materials for EAP and ENP by material designers. These word families are worth
special attention when designing English for EAP courses. Material designers can incorporate the NAWL vocabulary into their
academic reading and writing materials. Secondly, for EFL English learners who are interested in pursuing further study in
nursing, this frequently-used NAWL vocabulary can help them to expand their vocabulary size in a more effective and faster
way. Thus, teachers can direct students’ attention to the NAWL vocabulary. In this way, nursing students will have more
confidence when they read and write their academic texts. Thirdly, the concept of a word family is beneficial for learners
because knowledge of a base word can facilitate the understanding of its derived or inflected forms of words (Bauer & Nation,
1993). Since EFL learners have limited knowledge of word families, those identified in the present study can equip students
with a better sense of word families. When teaching these word families, English teachers need to show students the basic
words, inflected words and derived words by noting their contexts. Finally, teachers should encourage nursing students,
especially non-native English learners, to practice using these words in their writing of academic texts.

Appendix A. Nursing Academic Word List (listed by alphabetic order)

Letter Word families

A analyze, assess, area, affect, adolescent, approach, appropriate, available, assist, adjust, adult, alternative, attribute, anesthesia, access,
acute, attitude, antibiotic, analgesia, abuse, administer, approximate, adequate, achieve, artery, author, administrate, aspect, adhere, alter,
accurate, aware, adapt, aggression, adverse, abdomen, assign, assume, attach, aid, apparent, autonomy, assure, academy, activate,
acknowledge, allocate, anticipate, annual, appraise, acquire, acid, alert, alcohol, audit, absorb, angina, aspirate, ambulate, abstract, addict,
auditory, anatomy, admission, advocate, alleviate, appreciate, analogue, ascertain, attenuate,
B benefit, baseline, barrier, breast-feed, bias, brief, burden, bacteria,
C clinic, cancer, consist, conduct, community, criteria, chronic, conclude, correlate, category, caregiver, client, cope, consent, compliance,
component, cue, communicate, contribute, consume, contact, complex, cognition, consequent, context, concept, centimeter, cervix, culture,
contrast, consult, catheter, cohort, confirm, capacity, create, challenge, counsel, competence, coronary, construct, cell, cannula, checklist,
comment, cycle, comprehensive, correspond, considerable, colleague, chemotherapy, constipation, cite, chart, compress, compute,
covariate, coordinate, comprise, constant, commence, cluster, conflict, campaign, core, collaborate, congruence, clarify, concentrate,
constitute, convene, capture, capable, confound, consecutive, circumstance, county, couple, concurrent, compensate, complement,
confidential, caucasian, certificate, contaminate,
D data, demonstrate, design, discharge, diagnose, depress, dose, define, diabetes, drug, distress, demographic, document, detect, despite, diet,
dimension, donate, disorder, distribute, duration, diary, decline, domain, dense, deficit, deviate, devise, derive, display, disrupt, diverse,
decade, diminish, drain, disclose, discrepancy, deteriorate, distinct, development, designate, dynamic, discriminate, definite, drama, digit,
E evaluate, evident, emotion, exclude, enhance, efficacy, establish, expert, estimate, environment, expose, enroll, eligible, emergency, ethic,
ensure, ethnic, emphasis, emerge, energy, enable, elevate, error, element, engage, encounter, equip, extract, extubate, eliminate, episode,
epidemic, external, elicit, economy, explicit, equate, empower, exhaust, exert, equivalent, expand, exceed, exhibit, electron, endure, evolve,
F factor, focus, furthermore, function, facilitate, fatigue, figure, final, followup, fracture, fluid, finance, feedback, facet, formula, fund,
framework, feasible, feature, faculty, foundation, flexible, format, frustrate,
G guideline, gender, grade, goal, generate, globe, glucose, graduate, geography,
H hospice, hypothesis, hip, headache, household, hypertension, hormone, hence, heterogeneous,
I intervene, indicate, identify, individual, item, infant, interview, involve, investigate, impact, issue, income, intravenous, internal, intense,
infect, initial, intake, interact, index, implement, institute, impair, interpret, injure, initiate, injection, implicate, immune, induce, incidence,
instruct, interval, incorporate, illustrate, isolate, image, inventory, irritate, inflame, inhibit, input, integrate, insight, instance, infuse,
insert, invasive, intermittent,
J journal, job,
K kilogram,
L locate, lateral, lesion, laboratory, link, linear, lifestyle, longitudinal, literate, logistic, label,
M method, medical, major, minor, milliliter, morbid, mortality, muscle, mental, milligram, midwife, monitor, maintain, modify, marital,
mechanism, millimeter, maximise, mobile, malignant, metabolic, manipulate, motive, mediate, manual, mood, minimal, medication,
minimum, minimise, membrane, magnitude, modulate, margin, mandate,
N normal, negate, nutrition, nausea, nerve, norm, neurology, network, nevertheless,
O outcome, occur, obtain, overall, oral, option, objective, occupy, optimal, odd, obese, ongoing, onset, oncology, oxygen, orient, obvious,
obstruct, outpatient,
P participate, perceive, process, physical, proceed, previous, period, professional, positive, potential, predict, pregnant, pilot, peripheral,
primary, percent, physician, prior, phase, psychology, project, prevalent, policy, partner, prescribe, publish, placebo, proportion, physiology,
practitioner, prostate, protocol, pulmonary, perspective, phenomenon, priority, profile, parameter, peak, placement, persist, pharmacology,
pediatric, prospect, peer, prolong, pathology, protein, predominant, preliminary, personnel, pathways, plus, precede, principle, panel,
principal, pill, publication, progression, pulse, posture, premature, passive, precise, philosophy, province, prognosis, portion, probe,
 M.-N. Yang / English for Specific Purposes 37 (2015) 27–38 37

(continued )

Letter Word families

Q questionnaire, qualitative, quantitative, quit,
R respond, research, require, role, ratio, random, recipient, range, consist, reside, rely, rehabilitation, relevant, recruit, referral, renal, remove,
regress, reveal, region, respiratory, react, routine, recover, resource, restrict, retrospect, register, tradition, highlight, regulate, rotate,
revise, rural, radiate, resolve, retain, release, regimen, reinforce, relax, replicate, refine, reverse, recall, rationale, rigor, receptor, reject,
S significant, score, symptom, surgery, similar, specific, status, stress, strategy, statistic, survey, subscale, select, site, stimulate, seek, sex,
survive, structure, session, summary, shift, subsequent, sufficient, setting, source, spinal, stable, spouse, subjective, sedation, supplement,
standardize, stigma, schedule, sensation, section, syndrome, suppress, serum, supervise, sterile, strain, secure, specialize, series, sustain,
suction, scan, somewhat, spontaneous, sum, system, software, senior, sequence, spectrum, self-esteem, specify, staff, strengths, scope,
T therapy, transplant, technique, theory, team, target, theme, task, threshold, tissue, tolerate, trauma, trend, topic, transit, tumor, transcribe,
tense, toxic, transmit, timing, terminate, treat, tape, tract, trigger, technical, technology, transport, thorax, temporal, thereby
U undertake, urine, undergo, utilise, ulcer, unique, ultrasound, urban, ultimate, underlie, urgent,
V voluntary, vary, verbal, version, visual, valid, volume, vascular, via, visible, vital, verify, vaccine, vehicle, ventilate, vomit, vulnerable, vein,
victim,
W whereas, ward, well-being, withdraw, workload,

Note.
1. The words appearing in Appendix are not the headwords, but the most frequently occurring words of the families.
2. Word families in the MAWL are italicized and word families in the AWL are bold-faced.

Appendix B. Supplementary material

Supplementary material related to this article can be found online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2014.05.003.

References

Bauer, L., & Nation, I. S. P. (1993). Word families. International Journal of Lexicography, 6(4), 253-279.
Bloor, M. (1998). Variations in the methods section of research articles across disciplines: The case of fast and slow text. In P. Thompson (Ed.), Issues in EAP
writing research and instruction (pp. 84-106). Reading, England: Centre for Applied Language Studies, The University of Reading.
Campion, M., & Elley, W. (1971). An academic vocabulary list. Wellington, New Zealand: New Zealand Council for Educational Research.
Chen, Q., & Ge, G. (2007). A corpus-based lexical study on frequency and distribution of Coxhead’s AWL word families in medical research articles. English
for Specific Purposes, 26, 502-514.
Chen, P., Hu, K., & Ho, J. (2009). A study of academic vocabulary used in the abstracts of business and management journals. Taiwan International ESP Journal,
1(1), 51-76.
Chung, T., & Nation, P. (2003). Technical vocabulary in specialized texts. Reading in a Foreign Language, 5(2), 103-116.
Cobb, T., & Horst, M. (2004). Is there room for an AWL in French? In P. Bogaards, & B. Laufer (Eds.), Vocabulary in a second language (pp. 15-38) Amsterdam:
John Benjamins.
Coxhead, A. (2000). A new academic word list. TESOL Quarterly, 34(2), 213-238.
Coxhead, A., & Nation, I. S. P. (2001). The specialized vocabulary of English for academic purposes. In J. Flowerdew, & M. Peacock (Eds.), Research perspectives
on English for academic purposes (pp. 252-267). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Farrell, P. (1990). A lexical analysis of the English of electronics and a study of semi-technical vocabulary (ERIC Document Reproduction Service ED 332 551).
CLCS Occasional Paper No. 25. Dublin: Trinity College.
Ghadessy, P. (1979). Frequency counts, word lists, material preparation: A new approach. English Teaching Forum, 17, 24-27.
Heatly, A., Nation, I. S. P., & Coxhead, A. (2002). RANGE and FREQUENCY programs. Retrieved from http://www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/staff/Paul_Nation
Holmes, R. (1997). Genre analysis, and the social sciences: An investigation of the structure of research article discussion sections in three disciplines.
English for Specific Purposes, 16(4), 321-337.
Huang, C. C. (2010). A gap between textbooks and nursing students’ vocabulary knowledge. In S. Joe, S. Su, & M. Yang (Eds.), Pedagogical issues of EGP and
ESP: Theory and practice. Taipei, Taiwan: Crane.
Huang, J. Y. (2007). Exploring the use of vocabulary from academic word list in applied linguistic articles (Unpublished master’s thesis). Taiwan: National Tsing
Hua University, Taiwan.
Hyland, K. (2001). Humble servants of the discipline? Self-mention in research articles. English for Specific Purposes, 20, 207-226.
Hyland, K., & Tse, P. (2007). Is there an “academic vocabulary”? TESOL Quarterly, 41(2), 235-253.
Lam, J. (2001) (Research reports). A study of semi-technical vocabulary in computer science texts, with special reference to ESP teaching and lexicography (Vol. 3).
Hong Kong: Language Centre, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Laufer, B. (1992). How much lexis is necessary for reading comprehension? In J. L. Arnaud, & H. Beijoint (Eds.), Vocabulary and applied linguistics (pp. 126-
132) London: MacMillan.
Lynn, R. W. (1973). Preparing word lists a suggested method. RELC Journal, 4(1), 25-32.
Martínez, I. A., Beck, S. C., & Panza, C. B. (2009). Academic vocabulary in agriculture research articles: A corpus-based study. English for Specific Purposes, 28,
183-198.
Mudraya, O. (2006). Engineering English: A lexical frequency instructional model. English for Specific Purposes, 25(2), 235-256.
Nation, I. S. P. (1990). Teaching and learning vocabulary. New York, NY: Newbury House.
Nation, I. S. P. (2001). Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Praninskas, J. (1972). American university word list. London: Longman.
Read, J. (2000). Assessing vocabulary. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Samraj, B. (2002). Disciplinary variation in abstracts: The case of behavior and conservation biology. In Flowrdew (Ed.), Academic discourse (pp. 4-56).
Shaw, P. (1991). Science research students’ composing processes. English for Specific Purposes, 10, 189-206.
Stephens, J., Hagler, D., & Clark, E. (2011). Got PAD? Hidden dangers revealed with ABI. Journal of Vascular Nursing, 29(4), 153-157.
Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis. English in academic and research setting. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Thurstun, J., & Candlin, C. N. (1998). Concordancing and the teaching of the vocabulary of academic English. English for Specific Purposes, 17(3), 267-280.
Vongpumivitch, V., Huang, J., & Chang, Y. (2009). Frequency analysis of the words in the Academic Word List (AWL) and non-AWL content words in applied
linguistics research papers. English for Specific Purposes, 28, 33-41.
Wang, J., Liang, S., & Ge, G. (2008). Establishment of a medical word list. English for Specific Purposes, 27, 442-458.
West, M. (1953). A general service list of English words. London: Longman.
38 M.-N. Yang / English for Specific Purposes 37 (2015) 27–38

Wood, A. (2001). International scientific English: The language of research scientists around the world. In J. Flowerdew, & M. Peacock (Eds.), Research
perspectives on English for academic purposes (pp. 71-83). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Xue, G., & Nation, P. (1984). A University Word List. Language Learning and Communication, 3(2), 215-229.
Yang, M. N. (2011). Vocabulary size. Journal of Chang Gung Institute of Technology, 15, 113-132.

Ming-Nuan Yang is currently an associate professor of English in the General Education Center at Chang Gung University of Science and Technology. Her
main research interests include corpus-based study, English learning strategies and English for Specific Purposes.