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English for Specic Purposes 28 (2009) 170182

ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES

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A basic engineering English word list for less procient foundation engineering undergraduates
Jeremy Ward *
Institute of Social Technology, Suranaree University of Technology, Nakhon Ratchasima 30000, Thailand

Abstract This paper concerns the teaching of English to learners who are studying, or will soon study, engineering and who are expected to do at least part of their studying through textbooks written in English. Such students, especially in universities in developing countries, often nd themselves very poorly equipped by their secondary education for reading engineering material in English. This paper presents an original solution to the basic lexical problem: a word list for foundation engineers that (1) presupposes little lexical or grammatical knowledge, (2) can be used by learners with a low level of English, and (3) applies to all engineering disciplines. 2009 The American University. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Background It has been generally accepted for many years now that the ability to read depends in the rst instance on adequate linguistic, especially lexical, knowledge (see for example Alderson, 1984; Perfetti, 1991; or Laufer, 1991). Over the past 30 years or so it has become apparent that incoming university engineering undergraduates in many developing nations fall far short of the basic linguistic, and in particular lexical, knowledge necessary to read academic material in English (for Indonesia, see Nurweni and Read (1999); for Hong Kong, see Evans and Green (2007) and Kennedy (2001), who also mentions similar problems in Sudan and Jordan; for Oman, see Cobb and Horst (2001); these are only a few of many sources identifying this problem). The context of the present study is a university of technology in Thailand. It has been a staple of Thai education policy for at least 30 years that undergraduates in science and engineering should study their specialist subject matter by reading textbooks in English (Prapphal, 2001; Sagarik, 1978; Srisa-arn, 1998; Tuptimtong, 1996), and while these authors do not directly investigate the matter, they tend to agree that Thai students have little success in such reading. This researchers students have all studied English for at least 6 years at secondary school and probably before that; most have taken the national university entrance examination (though some are exempted from this). But the results from a recent year show that our intake obtained a mean score of only 36.5 on the English section (multiple choice format). There is also one hitherto unpublished investigation of
*

Tel.: +66 044224357; fax: +66 044224215. E-mail address: jeremy@sut.ac.th

0889-4906/$36.00 2009 The American University. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.esp.2009.04.001

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Thai engineering undergraduates vocabulary knowledge (Ward, 2005) which put students knowledge of the General Service Word List or GSL (which contains about 2000 word families) at only about 1000 word families, a gure very similar to Nurweni and Reads and Cobb and Horsts in the papers cited above. We therefore tentatively assume that Thai students share the diculties of lexis and reading, and that these diculties are intertwined. The most commonly cited paradigm for dealing with this EAP lexical problem comes mainly from the work of Paul Nation and his associates. The main tenets of the approach (which are briey and critically summarized in Nation and Waring (1997), among other places) are that EAP students should learn rst the 2000 or so most general words of English, followed by a set of academic words common to all academic disciplines. In practice this is taken to mean the 2000-word family GSL mentioned above (West, 1953) and the 570-word family Academic Word List or AWL (Coxhead, 2000), which would provide 7580% and about 10% coverage of tokens (running words) in a text, respectively. Incidentally, the Academic Corpus from which the AWL is derived does not actually contain an engineering section. The AWL gives 9.1% coverage of the science section of that corpus (Coxhead, 2000 p. 224), but in fact it appears to do slightly better with engineering material, covering 11.1% of the engineering section of Hyland and Tses academic corpus (Hyland & Tse, 2007 p. 240), and 11.3% of the engineering corpus used in this study and described in Section 3.5. In addition to the 8590% coverage given by the 2570 word families in the GSL and the AWL, the original paradigm (see Coxhead & Nation, 2001) claimed that technical words would make up about 5% of the tokens in academic text; but these were generally taken to be outside the remit of the English teacher and would be learnt through the subject specialist teacher. If this in fact happened, and if the GSL/AWL gave 90% coverage (giving total coverage of 95% of the tokens in a text), this would be sucient for the reader, in terms of the putative threshold of word knowledge necessary for the reader to use his L1 reading skills in reading L2 (Laufer, 1989). These gures obviously involve approximations and generalizations, and there is insucient space here to discuss all the variations on this general theme. But we will note two controversial points: rst, two more recent papers (Chung & Nation, 2003, 2004) have greatly broadened Nations idea of what constitutes technical vocabulary, to the point where it is now claimed to constitute more than 30% of tokens in some medical texts. Since this involves re-classifying a lot of words which were previously called general or academic, and which were thus in the GSL or AWL, our point about our learners poor knowledge of these words (see Sections 1 and 1.1) is relatively unaected. Second, Ward (1999) has claimed that it is possible to achieve 95% coverage of a foundation engineering text with a list of only 2000-word families. This list was derived from a 1 million-token corpus of foundation engineering textbooks which covered a broad range of the relevant subject matter. A larger and more comprehensive corpus of foundation engineering material was created by Mudraya (2006) but there was no report of the coverage achieved by this list. 1.1. Drawbacks in these approaches For teachers in situations like this writers, all these lists suer from the basic drawback that they are far too long for the weaker type of learner that we are dealing with. This is evidenced by the studies we mentioned in Section 1, which tend to agree that incoming students appear to know only about half of the GSL words; furthermore Nurweni and Reads study cited above, put student knowledge of the 830-word family University Word List (the AWLs predecessor) at about 30%. It may be objected that, as Nurweni and Read point out, their Indonesian undergraduate subjects certainly know some words which are not in any of these lists, probably they say a few hundred; and surely the same applies in Thailand, where school textbooks teach all sorts of such words, like mosquito, bualo, temple, and broom. But there still seems to remain a large gap between such students knowledge of relevant vocabulary and the targets of 2000 or 2570 words purportedly needed to read academic material. In addition, these word list coverage gures tell only part of the truth. The 2000 GSL words (which provide the 7580% coverage) are in fact headwords or word families, and if all the family members are counted, then the list in fact comprises over 8000 words. Likewise, the 570-word AWL expands to about 3000 when all family members are counted. These extra words are inected and derived forms of the headwords. Now clearly not all these forms pose as much diculty as new, separate headwords, and it is a common assumption of

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vocabulary studies that learners readily master inections (see for example a number of the studies in Daller, Milton, and Treers-Daller (2007)) as well as the easier derived forms (for an ease/diculty ranking of all these axes see Bauer & Nation, 1993). But it is simply misleading to assume, as so many writers seem to (see Ward & Chuenjundaeng, in press) that a student who knows one family member knows all the others. And in any case if the reader accepts the general point that the inected and derived forms add substantially to the learning load of the lists, then it seems reasonable to claim that our incoming undergraduates are even further from their lexical target than the basic headword gures suggest. The pedagogical aspects of the use of word families are discussed in Section 3.2. The two specialist foundation engineering lists mentioned above (Mudraya, 2006; Ward, 1999) share the problem described above of being, at 2000-word families, too long for learners who may know only half this number. This is compounded by them both being based on word families. Our research question, then, is: how can we create a word list, as a basis for a lexical syllabus, which is 1. Useful, in terms of text coverage and general frequency, for engineers in all subdisciplines and 2. Easy enough, in terms of length and technicality, for learners who have nothing like mastery of the GSL or the AWL?

2. Methodology We consulted lecturers in ve engineering faculties (chemical, civil, electrical, industrial and mechanical) and asked each to supply the names of ve textbooks commonly used in 3rd and 4th year undergraduate studies. We then selected at random pages from each of these 25 textbooks and counted the words in them until we reached about 10,000. We thus obtained a corpus of 25 10,000 = 250,000 words, which we will refer to as EC (engineering corpus). In practice the number of words was not exact and most samples turned out to have slightly over 10,000, so the actual size of EC was about 271,000 words. EC is thus not large by contemporary standards; can a 50,000-word sample (i.e. 10,000 words from each book) really represent an engineering discipline? Let us look at the example of chemical engineering. Table 1 lists (in the left-hand column) the courses oered in the 3rd and 4th year of study to chemical engineering students, and in the right-hand column whether the subject is represented by any of the ve 10,000-word texts in EC. All but three of the courses are represented in the corpus; but rather than go into perhaps unnecessary detail, we will merely claim that this subcorpus represents most of the core subject matter of 3rd/4th year chemical engineering texts needed for study at the authors institution. As stated above, it might seem that a corpus of foundation engineering material would be most suitable for the creation of a word list for foundation engineering students. That was the thinking behind the creation of the lists in Ward (1999) and Mudraya (2006). The corpora in these studies were derived from books on
Table 1 Chemical engineering 3rd and 4th year courses and the chemical engineering subcorpus of EC. SUT courses oered 1. Chemical reaction engineering 1 2. Chemical reaction engineering 2 3. Process equipment design and operation 1 4. Process equipment design and operation 2 5. Process equipment design and operation 3 6. Transport phenomena 1 7. Transport phenomena 2 8. Process dynamics and control 9. Chemical engineering plant design 1 10. Chemical engineering plant design 2 11. Numerical methods (mathematics) Text in EC Text 2 Text 2 None None Text 1 Text 3 Text 3 Text 4 (dynamics only) Text 5 Text 5 None

J. Ward / English for Specic Purposes 28 (2009) 170182 Table 2 Distribution of 10 common foundation engineering words (from Mudraya (2006)) in EC. Word family Pressure Velocity Stress Load Body Moment Fluid Beam Shear Equilibrium Total frequency in EC 376 239 507 537 87 257 134 404 337 192 Chemical engineering (EC) 145 82 6 7 3 0 85 1 4 72 Civil engineering (EC) 103 4 253 265 12 208 2 222 195 53 Electrical engineering (EC) 3 11 0 138 12 4 5 1 1 6 Industrial engineering (EC) 6 1 1 1 3 2 1 5 1 0

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Mechanical engineering (EC) 119 141 247 126 57 43 41 175 136 61

foundation engineering topics like engineering materials, statics, uid dynamics, and basic thermodynamics. One result of this is that by the time students have learnt the words on the list, many of them will be of little or no use to them. Table 2 shows some of the relevant data. The words in the left-hand column are all among the most frequent 100 in Mudrayas corpus. These words are also frequent in EC (shown in the total column). The next ve columns show their frequency in the ve subdisciplines represented in EC, in 3rd and 4th year studies. None of the words appear to be very important for industrial engineers, few for electrical engineers, and a minority are useful for chemical engineers. These are the most extreme examples of uneven distributions over EC, but the phenomenon is present to a lesser extent with many more of the most frequent 100 in Mudrayas and in Wards lists. These disciplines are lexically idiosyncratic, and this should be taken into account; especially as, with lexically challenged students, it is a question of priority. Time spent teaching (say) uid to civil engineering students would be better spent on words like load. We thus claim that EC is representative and at least reasonably comprehensive (representing a range of topics in a variety of major engineering elds), balanced (giving equal importance to each eld), genre-specic (only textbooks are represented) and relevant to student needs (textbooks for later years of undergraduate study). Other corpora, while considerably larger, do not address the specic needs of our students. Coxheads academic corpus, as mentioned above, contains no engineering section. Hyland and Tse (2007) use a 569,000word engineering corpus but this is conned to mechanical and electronic engineering, and includes a wide variety of genres (theses, research articles, etc.). This was the reason for the creation and use of EC to identify the vocabulary frequent in a wider representation of engineering subdisciplines, in a specic genre. We ran Paul Nations Range software (Heatley, Nation, & Coxhead, 2002) against the EC and obtained frequency data for all the words over the ve subsections representing each of the engineering subdisciplines. 3. Results and discussion We group results and discussion together as the actual results are, essentially, a single table giving the frequency and distribution data for all the words in EC. EC contains 10,290 word types among its 271,000 tokens. Obviously we cannot present all the data. Table 3 aims merely to give a avour of the results just three sets of four words near the top of the frequency ranking. Note the rank (frequency) column which shows where the word ranks in frequency over the whole corpus, and the range column showing how many of the ve subsections contain the word. The right-hand column is explained in Section 3.3.1. To create our new basic engineering list (for brevitys sake we will refer to this as BEL) three fundamental decisions were made on the basis of the results exemplied below. First, we exclude from BEL function words; second, we dene word (for purposes of the creation of BEL) as a word type, i.e. ignoring the idea of

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Table 3 Selected frequency and distribution data from EC. Word The Of Is And Flow Has Given Stress Conditions Required No Analysis Rank (frequency) 1 2 3 4 46 47 48 49 100 101 102 103 Range (/5) 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 4 5 5 5 5 Total frequency 27,211 11,890 7671 7415 529 524 507 507 302 302 302 302 Chemical engineering 4721 2234 1425 1572 204 89 128 6 85 38 85 38 Civil engineering 5239 2273 1353 1346 29 85 74 253 47 102 47 102 Electrical engineering 6269 2321 1887 1495 50 126 93 0 57 86 57 86 Industrial engineering 4956 2466 1519 1375 25 113 104 1 18 32 18 32 Mechanical engineering 6026 2596 1487 1627 221 111 108 247 95 44 95 44 PEAKRATIO 1.15 1.09 1.23 1.10 2.09 1.20 1.26 2.50 1.57 1.69 1.61 2.35

lemmas or word families; and third, we include only words which occur ve times or more in each subsection of the corpus (this is the distribution/frequency criterion). We will now examine each of these decisions in turn, in Sections 3.13.3. The reader may be interested to see a short section of text from the corpus with the words from the new BEL in bold. We may also write that velocity relative to all moving solid surfaces is zero at these surfaces, but the foregoing conditions are sucient to demonstrate the technique being used. It will be assumed that this is a steadystate operation, hence that no initial condition is necessary. We choose for this system the impeller diameter as our reference length, and the impeller diameter times the rate of impeller rotation in revolutions per unit time as our reference. (Bird, Stewart, & Lightfoot, 1960) 3.1. Function words As would be expected, the most frequent and widely distributed words in the corpus are function words like the/of/is/and/in/a/to/for/be/that/are/as/by/at/with/this/we/from/on/or. These are the 20 most frequent words in the corpus and all occur in all subdisciplines (see, for example, the distribution gures in Table 3). For a full list of function words see Nation (2001, p.430). We have omitted function words from BEL because many such words tend to have a number of meanings and these meanings tend to be dicult to explain or translate in isolation, as they often deal with abstract or grammatical relations. However, since they are clearly essential to the framing of any kind of proposition (as evidenced by their frequency) students will have encountered them a great deal during their secondary school learning. Similarly, because any context in which the content words are presented almost inevitably involves the use of function words, it is hoped that the most common of them will be acquired or reinforced, more or less incidentally, during the process of learning the content words of BEL. This is elaborated in Section 4, concerning pedagogical implications. 3.2. Word types For the purposes of BEL we decided to dene a word as a word type, treating each word separately rather than as part of a lemma or word family. The basic reason for this was explained in Section 1: the additional learning load associated with inected and derived forms. We will now consider this further. The question of derived forms (i.e. the word family), arises particularly in connection with so-called academic vocabulary. About 10% of the running words in EC are from the AWL (mentioned in Section 1) and much of this vocabulary is Latinate in origin and thus susceptible to morphological analysis. However,

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as pointed out by Corson (1997), students from non-Latinate L1 backgrounds are at a great disadvantage in this respect. For example, in a separate study (Ward & Chuenjundaeng, in press) we found that the set of words with the Latinate suxes -tion, -er, -ment and -ity accounted for no less than 3% of the tokens (running words) in the EC, but there is little reason to suppose that our learners undertake the morphological analysis implicit in the idea of the word family (see also Ward & Chuenjundaeng, in press; Schmitt & Meara, 1997). As for inected forms (i.e., loosely, the lemma), we would certainly admit that, overall, inections are more readily mastered than derivations. It may also be true that some inectional suxes, particularly the -s ax (nominal or verbal), present little diculty in themselves. But we would point out three things in response to this. First, while we acknowledge the general point, it is likely that inectional suxes are considerably easier for learners with L1s which themselves inect (unlike the Thai learners in the present study). Second, understanding the inected -ed and -ing forms, and distinguishing their various uses, often requires a considerable knowledge of English grammar, which our lower level learners are unlikely to possess. The following examples will illustrate this point. Calculate occurs 115 times in EC; 56 of these occurrences are at the beginning of sentences, i.e. as instructions in problems (Calculate the exit Mach number. . .); another 21 are preceded by to (the theory is used to calculate the active pressure); 75 are followed by the. Calculated, however, occurs typically in a dierent lexical/grammatical environment. Thus of the 90 EC occurrences of calculated, 57 are preceded by be (typically can be or may be), been, is, or are. This might be a simple matter to learners whose L1 passivizes in a similar way to English, but Thais do not t into this category. In particular, it is likely that they associate this form with the past tense calculated, of which there is, in fact, only one example in the corpus. Compounding this problem are the ten occurrences of the passive calculated in the corpus where the word is not explicitly marked by the auxiliary, as in the molar ux calculated at x is the same. . .; this is another potential source of confusion. It is for this reason that we suggest introducing the form separately. Consider also the diculty of trying to learn ing forms like following, assuming, and operating as if they were the same, i.e. mere ing inected adjuncts of their respective headwords. In fact these forms, three of the most common -ing inections in EC, are functionally and distributionally quite dierent from each other. Nearly all cases of following are preceded by the determiner the, in phrases like The following data The following examples The following equation Assuming, on the other hand, is most usually a participle Assuming that the concrete is stressed only within its elastic range, . . . Analyze this experiment assuming that all three factors are xed. . . While operating is most commonly used as an adjective (like following), it has nothing like the same textstructuring function . . .under all required operating conditions . . .some typical operating sequences and also occurs commonly as present continuous While the boiler is operating. . . Similar to those at which you are operating. . . A lemma approach of itself has no answer to these problems. In terms of inectional knowledge such as this, this author confesses to a feeling of disbelief when reading Schmitt and Mearas (1997) claim that nearly a quarter of their Japanese English major undergraduates simply did not recognize the existence of the ing forms of various verbs, in spite of being explicitly informed that they were verbs. These doubts were removed

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by the discovery that 44 of 72 subjects in our own yesno checklist test (see Section 3.3.2) did not check the word using implicitly claiming that they did not know it! Whichever explanation for this one advances either that they did not know use, or that they thought using was an (unknown) single morpheme like thing or sing points to a very limited knowledge of inections. Thirdly and nally, consider the lemmas rate and balance in Table 4. It is clear from the data in Table 4 that in some cases dierent inected forms have quite dierent distributional proles from each other and from the headword. Thus rate is essential learning for chemical engineers, but not so for other elds, while rated, is necessary only for electrical engineers, appearing virtually nowhere else in the corpus; balance is far more important for chemical engineers than others, balances appears useful only for chemical engineering, but balanced barely occurs in that eld. While we would not claim that such distributions are typical of all lemmas in EC, they do occur with some common words. For these three reasons we adopt as our unit of learning the word type. This matter arises again in section 4, on pedagogical implications. 3.3. Distribution/frequency 3.3.1. Distribution We note that there are a number of measures of distribution over dierent parts of a corpus and that we could simply choose words on this basis, i.e. just select the words with the most even distributions. Yangs PEAKRATIO (Yang, 1986) is perhaps the simplest of such measures (dividing the maximum frequency over the subsections by the mean frequency) and the PEAKRATIO (henceforward PR) gures are given in the last column in Table 3 (they range, in theory at least, between 1, for a word with a perfectly even distribution, and 5, for a word occurring in only one of ve subsections). The reader interested in more sophisticated measures such as Juillands D, which incorporates standard deviations but produces results that correlate highly with PEAKRATIO, is referred to Oakes (1998:190 .). In practice, however, if we choose words based on these measures we end up with many words which, while common in most or nearly all of the corpus subsections, are rare in one or two. Consider three examples shown in Table 5. Analysis has a PR of 2.35, which compared to the function words (the, etc.) at the top of the frequency table, is high; but the word is frequent in all subsections and would seem to merit inclusion in a list like BEL. But the PR of stress is only slightly higher, and stress appears to be of almost no importance in industrial and electrical engineering. Similarly, balanced, with a lower PR than either of these two words, is completely absent from the mechanical engineering corpus.
Table 4 Some idiosyncratic lemmas from EC. Word Balance Balanced Balances Rate Rated Rates Range (/5) 4 4 1 5 2 5 Total frequency 77 51 14 413 107 62 Chemical engineering 62 1 14 246 0 50 Civil engineering 5 13 0 8 0 3 Electrical engineering 7 15 0 18 106 3 Industrial engineering 3 22 0 89 1 5 Mechanical engineering 0 0 0 52 0 1

Table 5 Some misleading PEAKRATIO gures. Word Analysis Stress Balanced Range (/5) 5 4 4 Total frequency 302 507 51 Chemical engineering 38 6 1 Civil engineering 102 253 13 Electrical engineering 86 0 15 Industrial engineering 32 1 22 Mechanical engineering 44 247 0 PEAKRATIO 2.35 2.50 2.16

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So we simply listed every content word type (not lemma or family) occurring in all the ve subcorpora (i.e. dierent engineering disciplines) a certain number of times. This would ensure that no students were asked to learn words that might turn out to be irrelevant. 3.3.2. Frequency Of course how we set the frequency criterion determines the length of the resulting word list, but there is no reliable way to determine exactly how long it should be. Milton and Meara (1995) and Schmitt and Meara (1997) put the numbers of words learnt by Japanese and Arab EFL students in a year in the low to mid-hundreds respectively, though Cobb and Horst (2001, p.328) cite two earlier claims of learners being lexically underchallenged. With BEL, if we include any word that appears in every subdiscipline of EC a minimum of ten times, we obtain a list of 112 words. If on the other hand we lower the frequency criterion to 5, the list is 299 words long; if to 3, the list is 602 words long. We settled on a frequency cuto of 5 in each subdiscipline. Thus no word occurring fewer than 25 times in the whole corpus was included. In fact about 90% of the words in BEL occur at frequency >50 over the 271,000-word corpus. The reader will perhaps agree that such words can loosely be described as frequent, on the grounds that, in an average textbook, each one occurs (very roughly) once every two pages. As already stated, this gave a list of 299 word types (see Appendix). 299 is a guess as to a modest, plausible lexical target for a years work. The 299 target becomes even more plausible because not all of it will be new to learners. 188 of the words actually occur in the rst 1000 words of the GSL (with 28 from the second 1000 and 78 from the AWL). This is very far from being a guarantee that any particular item will be known (a claim central to this study) but it does suggest that most students will have met some of the list. In fact, on a yes-no checklist test given to 102 rst-year engineering students at the authors institution, based on a random sample of 40 words from BEL mixed with 20 non-words, scored as per Meara and Buxton (1987), the average score was 33%. Students appear to have a very sketchy knowledge of BEL. BEL is not intended for students at even an intermediate level; it is for situations where secondary education has failed to bring students anywhere near any kind of linguistic threshold level (Hunt & Beglar, 2005). In this connection we would also point out the non-technicality of BEL, which makes it even more accessible. This non-technicality is obvious from a glance at the list (see Appendix), which will suggest that engineering (rather than any specic eld of engineering) is more about things like processes, functions, considering, determining and design than (as a layman might suppose) more technical things like torque, ux or equilibrium. As was suggested by Table 2, technicality usually correlates with narrow distribution, and all the words in BEL are, in engineering terms, widely distributed more or less frequent in all ve subdisciplines represented here. The absence of technicality is important because BEL is aimed at students who have not yet studied much or perhaps any specialist engineering, and is likely to be taught by teachers from humanities backgrounds who are similarly challenged by technical terminology. 3.4. An objection to BEL An obvious objection to BEL is that it still leaves the student some way short of the lexical knowledge required to read his or her engineering textbooks (for corroboration of this see Section 3.5). Let us examine this claim in a little more detail. Assume for a moment that a learner has learnt BEL and also knows the function words of English. Let us look at the gaps the non-BEL content words that would still exist in his/her lexis, for purposes of reading textbooks. The most frequently-occurring 10 of these non-BEL content words can be seen in the left-hand column of Table 6, followed by their range over 5 subdisciplines, their total frequency and their occurrence in each of the subdisciplines. As is obvious from a glance, all these words are more or less unevenly distributed across EC and thus decidedly more important for some elds than others. This suggests that they would be better taught in subject specialist classes, not in an EAP class. A more representative idea of the non-BEL content words is provided by a sample of those occurring in EC at frequency >25. See below Table 7 for a random sample of 20, with the gures corresponding to those in

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Table 6 The 10 most common non-BEL content words. Word Load Stress Current Motor Beam Pressure Power Speed Shear Range 5 4 4 3 5 5 5 4 5 Total frequency 537 507 487 420 404 376 352 348 337 Chemical engineering 1 1 21 0 5 6 15 9 1 Electrical engineering 138 0 460 414 1 3 272 272 1 Civil engineering 265 253 0 0 222 103 1 0 195 Industrial engineering 7 6 4 1 1 145 33 11 4 Mechanical engineering 126 247 2 5 175 119 31 56 136

Table 7 A random sample of 20 non-BEL content words. Word Pressure Velocity Circuit Beams Reactor Square Side Treatment Eective*** Bars Coil Coordinates Specic*** Functions*** Various*** Vector Selected*** Terminal Flows*** Solid Range 5 5 3 3 3 5 5 5 5 4 3 5 5 5 5 4 5 4 5 4 Total frequency 376 239 161 160 157 117 110 109 100 85 84 81 80 75 75 74 66 61 58 52 Chemical engineering 6 1 7 0 0 49 2 84 5 2 0 3 4 10 3 0 33 1 3 0 Electrical engineering 3 11 152 0 1 13 34 2 19 6 82 2 6 18 14 21 7 57 11 5 Civil engineering 103 4 0 116 0 22 24 7 63 73 0 7 9 4 11 6 17 0 1 7 Industrial engineering 145 82 0 1 155 2 26 11 9 0 1 13 36 25 35 1 5 1 11 29 Mechanical engineering 119 141 2 43 1 31 24 5 4 4 1 56 25 18 12 46 4 2 32 11

Table 6. These words, examples of the gaps in our hypothetical learners knowledge after studying BEL, may be said to be of various types, reecting both the weaknesses and strengths of the list. The distributions of many of them suggest that, like the items in Table 6, they are more suitable for learning after specialization (e.g. vector, terminal). The ability to focus on what is really common to all engineering students is a strength of BEL. On the other hand we note the presence of 6 words (marked by in the table) which are family members of words that actually appear in BEL. Having previously argued that family members are in fact distinct (Section 3.2) we can hardly now argue that they are the opposite; but it is almost certainly true that the knowledge of select (from BEL) will be of help in understanding selected (a non-BEL word). If this proportion of family members (6/20) holds over all the population of non-BEL words, it will make the gaps in learners knowledge easier to ll. As to the weaknesses of the list, a number of these non-BEL content words are quite common and quite widely distributed (only just falling short of the range/frequency criteria for inclusion in BEL); we may call these general words. Examples are side, eective, and various. Clearly a certain proportion of learners would know very few of such words and, since they would not learn them in a BEL-based class, would be left with

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substantial gaps in their lexical knowledge. On the other hand a certain proportion would know most of them and would be perhaps seriously underchallenged by BEL. It is a weakness of BEL that these learners would not be adequately catered for. However it is our belief that such learners would form a clear minority of the target learning group. In sum, we claim that many of the gaps, but not all, left by BEL are best lled at a level higher than foundation engineering. In other words the list is not perfect, but is highly appropriate for rst-year students. 3.5. Coverage Using BEL as the base words in the Range software (Heatley et al., 2002), we ascertain the coverage BEL gives of the engineering corpus (EC) as a whole. Table 8 shows the gures. These gures represent substantial, ecient coverage. But since BEL is actually based on frequency in the EC itself, it is not surprising that we see these high numbers. Does this coverage hold up against other engineering material? My own research has largely been in the area of chemical engineering English and I was able to run BEL against the three other undergraduate textbooks in the eld. This yielded coverage by BEL of 17.2, 15.6, and 21% of the tokens in the three textbooks. Against a text on mass transfer (a topic straddling chemical and mechanical engineering) coverage was 17.7%. Coverage appears to hold up. By contrast BELs coverage of the Brown corpus (a 1 million-word corpus of general written American English) is only 5.8%. This shows that although BEL is not technical (see Appendix), it is characteristically an engineering list. Incidentally, the Academic Word List, with nearly twenty times as many word types as BEL, gives only 11.3% coverage of EC. This is not a criticism of AWL but does serve to highlight the excellent coverage given by BEL. 3.6. 4. Pedagogical implications It is a reasonable assumption from all the above that BEL can in principle be taught, by teachers unfamiliar with technical matters, to all types of engineers in the early stages of their university careers, and that it will prove useful to all of them throughout their studies. It remains to give some brief examples of how BEL might be used in the classroom. The point about using word types rather than lemmas or families is that it is not intended for students merely to learn the words in isolation. Learners poor knowledge of the GSL reects not only an inadequate breadth of vocabulary knowledge, but also low general prociency; even if they learned the words by rote, this might still leave them struggling in terms of speed of lexical access (automaticity of processing) or of the grammatical knowledge necessary to read eectively (one aspect of depth of word knowledge). It is now a commonplace that learning words is best undertaken through multiple exposures in dierent contexts over extended periods of time. By learning these words in this way students will be enhancing and acquiring a true sight vocabulary. As an example let us return to the word calculate. As we saw in Section 3.2, Calculate occurs 115 times in EC; 56 of these occurrences are at the beginning of sentences, i.e. as instructions in problems (Calculate the

Table 8 coverage by EL of subdisciplinary engineering texts in EC. Discipline Chemical engineering Civil engineering Electrical engineering Industrial engineering Mechanical engineering Average coverage % Coverage of tokens by BEL 16.8 15.3 13.8 17.2 16.9 16.4

180 Table 9 Some sample data. x 0 1 2 3 4

J. Ward / English for Specic Purposes 28 (2009) 170182

y 1 3 5 7 9

z 0 2 4 6 8

exit Mach number. . .); another 21 are preceded by to (the theory is used to calculate the active pressure); 75 are followed by the. We thus have a typical grammatical environment, a context, in which to present the word something like (a) Calculate the. . . or (b) We can use x to calculate the. . . Two points emerge here. First, learners are being exposed to function words (can, to, the) which occur naturally and frequently in the context. Second, within this context learners are exposed to other BEL items like use, used, using, value, data, maximum, and minimum (see below), all of which co-occur with some frequency with calculate in the corpus. One type of exercise might go like this; note that for economys sake we have also used this exercise to provide sample contexts for other BEL words. Using the data in Table 9, answer the questions below. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Calculate the value of y at x = 2.5. Calculate the value of z at x = 3. What is the formula for calculating z from x? In the table, the maximum value of x is lower than the maximum value of z. True or false? In the table, the minimum value of y is lower than the minimum value of z. True or false?, etc.

Calculated, however, would be taught separately to take account of its dierent lexico-grammatical environment. Again we, will for economy, use Table 9 for illustration. A possible task might look something like this (note again the opportunity for bringing in other BEL words like known, greater, etc.): Complete the following sentences according to the information in Table 9. Use the following words: value; calculated. (a) The. . .(1). . . of x can be. . .(2). . . if . . .(3). . . is known. (b) The value of x . . .(3). . . in question 1 above is greater than the. . .(4). . . of y in equation 2.

4. Conclusion BEL is a 299-word list for foundation engineering students which represents a relatively easy target for learners whose high school education has not equipped them for the linguistic challenges they face in reading English language textbooks. The list is short and non-technical in nature but gives excellent coverage of a wide variety of engineering textbook material. By concentrating on word types rather than lemmas or families, it encourages learning not only of individual words but also of their lexico-grammatical environments.

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Appendix BEL words and their frequency in engineering corpus EC (the engineering corpus) (ranked in order of frequency): System 924 shown 853 equation 758 example 643 value 568 design 564 used 555 section 532 ow 529 given 507 determine 502 time 500 gure 476 using 450 model 430 rate 413 01 force 399 table 396 control 388 number 384 use 380 values 372 process 337 constant 334 equations 334 function 325 factor 322 temperature 321 problem 319 data 314 case 303 conditions 302 required 302 analysis 294 solution 293 maximum 290 following 289 consider 280 results 276 steel 274 equal 271 state 270 total 261 obtain 260 line 253 method 253 distribution 245 area 240 obtained 240 see 237 mass 232 terms 232 surface 231 eect 230 small 222 assume 214 nd 214 ratio 214 form 212 made 209 large 206 variable 203 column 197 end 197 direction 193 eects 192 result 192 applied 191 change 191 factors 188 systems 188 chapter 187 assumed 186 set 179 material 178 note 176 length 174 unit 171 determined 169 diagram 168 possible 168 show 166 found 164 average 161 dierent 158 standard 158 type 158 block 156 follows 155 normal 154 shows 154 order 153 xed 150 means 150 part 145 points 144 called 142 considered 141 independent 140 components 139 level 137 sections 136 high 135 size 135 computer 134 curve 134 gives 134 linear 134 simple 134 usually 134 dened 133 necessary 133 general 132 increase 132 sum 131 estimate 129 position 128 problems 128 range 128 described 126 known 125 work 122 yield 121 corresponding 118 positive 118 limit 117 becomes 116 low 116 calculate 115 negative 115 plot 115 important 114 available 112 initial 112 methods 112 times 112 based 111 discussed 111 parameters 110 taken 109 minimum 108 difference 107 assuming 106 resulting 105 similar 105 distance 104 greater 103 relative 103 single 103 density 102 respectively 102 component 101 series 101 thickness 99 well 99 compute 98 present 97 real 97 equivalent 96 main 96 occurs 96 procedure 96 desired 95 take 95 additional 94 measured 94 several 94 connected 93 expressed 93 law 93 yields 93 further 92 give 91 particular 91 calculated 90 actual 89 addition 89 complex 89 need 89 theory 88 changes 87 appropriate 86 behavior 86 reduced 86 place 85 cases 84 developed 84 information 84 occur 84 loss 83 approach 82 common 82 make 82 approximately 81 long 81 properties 81 uniform 81 lower 80 curves 79 chosen 78 location 78 characteristics 77 represents 77 signicant 77 parts 75 draw 74 larger 74 requires 74 specied 74 next 73 period 73 expected 72 select 72 lines 71 written 71 higher 70 solve 70 designed 69 increases 69 produced 69 assumption 68 basic 68 application 67 presented 67 produce 67 right 67 nal 66 approximate 65 develop 65 limits 65 relationship 65 variation 63 directly 62 done 62 fact 62 illustrated 62 placed 62 previous 62 compare 61 elements 61 entire 60 smaller 60 combined 59 discussion 59 simply 59 compared 58 require 58 practice 57 represent 57 study 57 needed 56 reduce 56 seen 56 few 55 manner 55 complete 54 increasing 54 left 54 numerical 54 practical 54 solving 54 true 54 combination 53 consequently 53 degree 52 depends 51 illustrate 51 calculations 50 drawn 50 space 50 close 49 include 49 last 49 plotted 49 referred 49 related 49 examples 48 relatively 48 apply 47 indicates 46 repeat 46 provides 44 added 43 separate 43 comparison 42 special 41 varies 41 clearly 40 steps 40 initially 39 slope 39 identical 38 taking 38 follow 37 basis 36 remain 36 exist 35 major 33. References
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