English for Specific Purposes (ESP) educators often face dilemma in deciding what lexical items to teach their students. In the field of English for Nursing Purposes (ENP), there is no exception on this issue as well. Only by analyzing the nursing corpus made up of essential core textbooks that can provide better insights and guide to both nursing students and educators. This research aims to highlight the 2,000 most frequently used nursing words across the core textbooks of nursing and to profile the types of 'low frequency' lexis which comprise the nursing corpus in terms of the General Service List (GSL) and Academic Word List (AWL) lexis coverage. By knowing the frequently used nursing words would further reduce students' reading deficiency if the students use the 2000-word list.

This study aimed to find out to what extent an intuitively developed ESP module for Science majors, taught at Sultan Qaboos University is appropriately written in terms of lexicon when compared to a core Geology textbook. The module was developed based on key topics which appeared in the Geology textbook. This study will only be evaluating vocabulary and will not be looking at other aspects of material evaluation. The digitized pages of the Module (LANC 2050) and the Essentials of Geology Textbook were loaded into the Software of WordSmith 5.0 for analysis. The results revealed low percentage word coverage in the module as compared with the limited pedagogical word list that was developed for Geology. In addition, the high density and low consistency ratios for the module as compared to the textbook indicated the compactness of the module for teaching purposes. A very low percentage of the technical words that were related to Geology was discovered in the Module (LANC 2050).

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Engineering textbooks are specialized in nature, containing technical terminology which can be challenging to learners. For better comprehension of engineering concepts, there is a need for bridging the language gap by focusing on the frequently used and important engineering vocabulary. Most English Language Teaching (ELT) teachers do not necessary possess the specialist language in the field of engineering which can be rather confusing to them. It has been reported that Malaysian engineering textbooks (syllabus) were not written based on any word lists or corpora. Hence, learners require the language needed in the field of engineering – English for Engineering Purposes (EEP). To meet this requirement, specialised engineering textbooks were studied to specify the meaningful lexical components which can facilitate learners to assimilate into their discourse community. In the field of civil engineering, there is no exception that learners too need to understand the composition of words found in their textbooks. This study shows the exact word lists and suggests what learners and teachers can do to learn the “language of civil engineering”.

Students are believed to learn at optimum level with materials with a lot of white space since the existence of vast number of words and limited amount of white space, especially in textbooks may contribute to the increase in anxiety among learners (Tomlinson, 1998). This study evaluates the amount of white space in terms of pixels in the Malaysian KBSM Form 2 English textbook using MATLAB 7.5. The findings reveal the inadequacy of white space in terms of pixels in our local textbooks. Not many pages have the percentage of white space exceeding 90 percent which is believed to be the ideal on a page. Hence, this method of evaluation can aid textbooks writers or evaluators to create textbooks that are less threatening so that learning a language with textbooks might just be productive to both learners and educators.