General Service and Academic Words in Psychology Research Articles: A Corpus Based Study

Nowadays, Master and PhD students in English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts are required to read and publish research articles in international journals in English (Flowerdew, 2015). In this regard, they constantly face serious linguistic barriers (Corcoran, 2017; Li & Flowerdew, 2020), and limited vocabulary knowledge further adds to their plight and inability to read and write in English, with some consequences for their participation in the scientific communities (Bazerman et al., 2012). Moreover, in most EFL contexts, many university students fail to learn the 2000 most frequent word families in English (Webb & Chang, 2012), and therefore fall far short of the vocabulary demands of reading academic texts in English (Ward, 2009). Hence, the focus on the vocabulary learning needs of university students is an important undertaking for a number of reasons. First, given the current emphasis on promoting disciplinary literacy (Airey et al., 2017), such a focus can help material developers, teachers, and students to identify the most salient and important vocabulary items for different subject areas. Second, as vocabulary instruction receives insufficient attention in language courses (Webb & Nation, 2017), developing vocabulary lists for different disciplines can help students in self-directed and autonomous learning of those items. And third, with such a minimal focus on vocabulary in the classroom, EAP teachers can make their instruction more congruent with the needs of the students, and make the most out of classroom time. The current study reports some findings from a larger corpus-based study of psychology research articles. Given the limited empirical attention to the discipline of psychology in university vocabulary studies (Coxhead, 2018), the findings can help teachers and students in EAP and English for Research Publication Proposes (ERPP) courses in psychology.