Investigating the Vocabulary Load of Psychology Textbooks: A Corpus-Based Study

07 May 2020, Version 1
This content is an early or alternative research output and has not been peer-reviewed by Cambridge University Press at the time of posting.

Abstract

The current corpus-based study investigated the lexical profile of psychology textbooks using BNC/COCA list. To this end, 30 introductory and general psychology textbooks with around 14.8 million running words were analyzed. The findings indicated that 2048 word families provided 82.66% coverage of the corpus. The study identified 1294 high frequent and 754 mid-frequent word families with high value for psychology students, which makes it possible to have a better and well-tuned vocabulary learning goals.

Keywords

lexical profile
discipline specific word lists
psychology
high-frequent words
mid-frequent words
corpus linguistics
EAP

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