English Vocabulary for Equine Veterans: How Different from GSL and AWL Words

ESP students are usually suggested to master general and academic word lists such as Wests’ (1953) General Service List (GSL) and Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) to be able to read their academic texts. However, it seems that university students may not need to learn all the words in the two lists as some words in the lists are of less frequency in academic texts. Moreover, there are some nontechnical words which occur frequently in academic disciples but are absent in the two lists. The present study attempted to identify words which frequently occur in equine veterinary academic texts. To that end, a corpus of over 3.6 million running words, containing equine veterinary journal articles, was developed and analyzed using some text analysis software (TextStat and TextAnalys). As Coxhead the frequency of 100 was set as the criterion for word selection. The results revealed that 1091 GSL word families and 116 AWL word families were of less frequency (i.e., occurred less than 100 times) in the EVC (Equine Veterinary Corpus) and there were 214 nontechnical word families which occurred frequently in the EVC but were absent in the GSL and AWL. The high frequency GSL and AWL words alongside the newly identified words constituted the Equine Veterinary Word List (EVWL), which covered the EVC 2.5% more than the combination of GSL and AWL although it consisted of 993 fewer words. The findings can benefit equine veterans, veterinary students, EAP teachers, materials developers and researchers.