Corpus-based list of general academic words of Persian language: Extraction and validation by out-of-sample performance evaluation method

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Faculty of Perisan Literature and Foreign Languages, University i'Tabataba A

2 PhD Candidate of teaching Persian language to non-Persian speakers, Allameh Tabataba'i University (ATU) Tehran

3 Associate Professor of Linguistics, Department of Linguistics, Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, Allameh Tabataba'i University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

The ever-increasing expansion of university education in English has further highlighted the necessity of compiling and extracting university word lists. The concept of academic words was prominently introduced in the English language first by Coxhead's Academic Word List (AWL) based on the three criteria of frequency, scope and specialized occurrence, and then by Gardner and Davis' Academic Word List (AVL). These two lists have provoked many scientific discussions and made the place of academic words in second language education more prominent than before. Despite the importance of knowledge of academic vocabulary, there is still a gap of extensive and detailed experimental research to extract and identify academic vocabulary in Persian language. Rezvani, Goltash and Zamani have extracted and proposed a list of 539 general academic words of the Persian language from a corpus of 927,008 words based on the two principles of frequency and range. Their corpus consists of seven books and 112 articles from 28 different journals. The current research has analyzed the corpus of Ferdowsi University, which consists of 1100 research articles in various academic fields, containing more than 8 million words, with the aim of providing a more detailed list of general academic words in the Persian language. For this purpose, the frequency of the words was calculated according to academic field, in five categories (veterinary medicine, agriculture, basic sciences, humanities and engineering). Then, based on the three criteria of frequency, range and specialized occurrence of Coxhead, words that have a minimum frequency of 100 in all five categories were extracted and finally a list of 587 word families was proposed. In order to compare the results and the accuracy of the proposed list, a witness corpus was created by the researchers from 87 articles in the field of Persian language and literature education within the framework of this article. Then, the coverage of the proposed list of this research was calculated and checked with Rezvani's list in the control corpus, and the results showed that the suggested list of this research shows more coverage on this control corpus.

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References

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