Building a Semi-Technical Political News Word List for Political Science Students

Abstract

A lack of knowledge of the political terminology used in news writing makes it difficult for L2 learners of English in the field of political science to keep themselves abreast of current worldwide political situations. This study built a semi-specialised word list for political science students interested in international political news. The Political News Corpus (PNC) was compiled between January 1, 2019 and June 30, 2021 from 6 news agencies: CNN, Politico, BBC, The Sun, ABC News, and 9News. The PNC contained 4,814 news items with a total size of 3,837,958 running words. Five criteria based on Laosrirattanachai and Ruangjaroon's (2021) Filters (lexical frequency, lexical range, lexical profiling, lexical keyness, and expert consultation) were used to build the Semi-Technical Political News Word List (S-TPNWL). The AntWordProfiler programme (Anthony, 2014) and the Key-BNC programme (Graham, n.d.) were used to extract candidate words. The findings showed that the S-TPNWL contained 172 word families and covered approximately 5.28 per cent of the PNC. Political science students interested in international political news could utilise the S-TPNWL to increase their vocabulary range and understanding when reading political news. Also, teachers can benefit from the S-TPNWL by using it as a reference for creating teaching materials.