Abstract

Vocabulary knowledge is essential in learning a second language, especially in an academic context. This corpus-based lexical study in ESP (English for Specific Purposes) presents the most frequently used medical academic vocabulary across a wide range of medical textbooks in addition to their frequent collocation/phraseological patterns. Academic Word List in Medicine (AWLM) of the study was compiled from the Medical Academic Corpus with 3.5 million running words in written medical textbooks by examining the range and frequency of words outside the first 2,000 most frequently occurring words of English (BNC/COCA2000) (Nation, 2012) and the Academic Word List (AWL) (Coxhead, 2000). The list contains 505 word families, which account for 11.27% of the tokens of the corpus of the study. Including the most frequent highly specialized medical terms of Greek/Latin sources, the AWLM encompasses various sub-technical and technical vocabularies. For the first time in research to develop wordlists in medicine, the list of the most frequently-occurring collocation/phraseological patterns (MACL) of the words was also retrieved to help ESL/EFL (English as a second/foreign language) students fulfil their vocabulary needs in reading medical textbooks in English. The list may facilitate the process of teaching for ESP lecturers by focus on their vocabulary teaching and designing curriculum for instructors as well.