Corpus-based Studies on Nursing Textbooks

Abstract

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.

A study on the most frequent academic words in high impact factor english nursing journals: A corpus-based study

“…This study was conducted on 2851 full-text and peer-reviewed articles consisting of 8196,953 tokens in 13 English nursing journals with an IF over 0.7. The number of the words in this study (8196,953 tokens) is much more than the numbers in the studies conducted on nursing words by Takakubo,[22] Budgell et al .,[23] Mukundan and Jin,[24] Nor Mohamad and Jin,[4] and Yang. [25] The number is even more than twice the number of the words in the studies by Mukundan and Jin with 3490,417 words[24] and Nor Mohamad and Jin with 3640,760 words,[4] who have used the highest number of words so far.…”

“…[13] However, teachers of English for specific purposes (ESP) educational programs are often uncertain about what vocabulary their students need to learn. [45] To provide learners of ESP with the required language to study texts, they have to be provided with the vocabulary they really need. [6]…”

“…[24] Nor Mohamad and Jin extracted a 2000-word list of frequent words by working on 3640,760 tokens in 7 nursing textbooks. [4] In addition, Yang, by doing research on 252 nursing articles consisting of 1006,934 tokens, introduced a list of 676 frequent word families. [25] Most of these studies have investigated nursing vocabulary in nursing textbooks, and none of them has investigated frequent vocabulary in a large number of nursing articles in high IF nursing journals.…”

“…Given the importance of vocabulary in learning any language,[1234] the importance of scientific research,[13] the importance of high IF scientific journals,[1516] the importance of nursing scientific journals,[1920] and the need of medical sciences students to English for reading and writing scientific articles in medical journals,[21] this study investigated the most frequent words in high IF (>0.7) English nursing journals and introduced a word list as the High-impact Nursing Academic Word List (HI-NAWL). In addition, the coverage of the 1 st common 3000 word families of English and the Coxhead's AWL[7] in nursing scientific journals with an IF over 0.7 was also investigated.…”

Comparing the Vocabulary Classification and Keyword Analysis Approaches to Determining Technical Vocabulary of Islamic Studies

“…Recent changes in the flowering borderless global education have paved the way for the increased needs of discipline-specific English vocabulary lists and ESL materials to facilitate ESL learning in academic specializations, which eventually facilitate the mastery of the core knowledge and or skills needed in those specializations [1]. Specialized vocabulary lists developed for finance [6], pharmacy [7,8], nursing [9,10], agriculture [11], newspaper [12], social sciences [13], plumbing [14] and engineering [15], are just a hand's full of the increasing number of technical vocabulary lists developed recently. These subject-specific wordlists are important addition to already existing academic wordlist such as Coxhead's Academic Word List (henceforward abbreviated as AWL) and the New Academic Word List [16].…”