A New Computer Science Academic Word List

Abstract

This corpus-based vocabulary study aimed to develop a new computer science academic word list across ten sub-disciplines of computer science defined by Association for Computing Machinery (hereafter ACM). A corpus of Computer Science containing 2,500,990 running words was developed from 300 Computer Science Research Articles (hereafter CSRAC) as a database of this study. Drawing on and combining procedures and methods from Coxhead (2000), Gardner and Davies (2014) and other previous studies, this study developed a New Computer Science Academic Word List (hereafter NCSAWL), containing the most frequently-used computer words in computer research articles from the corpus. The NCSAWL contains 444 words, which accounts for approximately 20.33% of the coverage in the CSRAC, the NCSAWL has a much better coverage of computer English. The result of this study has numerous implications for computer science learners, English teachers, researchers, as well as material writers and course syllabus designers. For examples, English computer teachers should focus on teaching learners the most high-frequent words which have a dispersed coverage and have special meaning and use in the discipline of computer science. Teachers could also raise the awareness of learners that some words have different meanings and uses in general English. The material designers for English for academic and special purposes could incorporate the NCSAWL vocabulary into their academic reading and writing materials for computer science students. Researchers and English language teachers who are interested in expanding their computer science academic vocabulary could also use this NCSAWL.