Academic vocabulary: myth or reality?

Most L2 vocabulary acquisition studies have emphasized the importance of a 'sub-technical' or 'academic' vocabulary alongside core words and technical terms in academic discourse (cf. Nation 2001: 187-216). A number of word lists have been compiled to meet the academic vocabulary needs of students in higher education settings. The 'Academic Word List' (AWL) (Coxhead 2000) is the most widely used today in language teaching, testing and materials development (e.g. Schmitt and Schmitt 2005). It consists of 570 word families which have a wide range and reasonable frequency of occurrence in a large corpus of academic texts (e.g. 'approximate', 'capacity', 'link', 'presume', 'summary', 'widespread', etc.). Recent corpus-based studies in English for Academic Purposes (EAP), however, have brought to light a high degree of variation across academic texts and led some authors to question the usefulness of a general EAP approach. Hyland and Tse (2007: 238), for example, question the widely held assumption that "a single inventory can represent the vocabulary of academic discourse and so be valuable to all students irrespective of their field of study". They show that the coverage of AWL items in a corpus representing a range of academic disciplines is not evenly distributed. They further argue that "all disciplines shape words for their own uses" (ibid: 240) as demonstrated by their clear preferences for particular meanings and collocations. The noun 'strategy', for example, has different preferred associations across disciplines (e.g. 'marketing strategy' in business, 'learning strategy' in applied linguistics and 'coping strategy' in sociology). The authors thus conclude that "By considering context, cotext, and use, 'academic vocabulary' becomes a chimera" (ibid 250). If academic vocabulary is a chimera, one can wonder which words EAP tutors should teach in international EAP programmes. In our study we use a corpus-driven method to assess whether or not it is possible to identify a common core that can be taught in a general EAP context. As Eldridge (2008: 111) reminds us, "though one function of research is to unravel what distinguishes different fields and genres, another function is to find similarities and generalities that will facilitate instruction in an imperfect world." To date, few EAP corpus-based studies have performed this double function. Our study is based on a new ESP corpus, the 'Varieties of English for Specific Purposes dAtabase' (VESPA), which contains scientific articles from top journals in three domains: business, medicine and linguistics. We focus on lexical verbs in view of their ability to modulate the message via tense, aspect, mood and voice, and the lexico-grammatical difficulties they prove to pose for language learners (e.g. Hinkel 2002, Swales and Feak 2004, Nesselhauf 2004, Paquot 2007, Granger and Paquot forthcoming). We compare the three domain-specific corpora with the fiction sub-corpus of the 'British National Corpus' and extract key verbs in business, linguistics and medicine. We then compare the three lists of key verbs with a view to identifying the similarities and differences between them in terms of meaning, lexico-grammar and phraseological patterns