Advancing disciplinary literacy through English for academic purposes: Discipline-specific wordlists, collocations and word families for eight secondary subjects

Abstract

The knowledge of academic vocabulary is crucial for educational success, and recently there has been a push amongst teachers and researchers to assist students at the pre-tertiary level to develop their disciplinary literacy and understanding of how academic English varies across disciplines. EAP research has developed advanced methods for producing corpus-informed vocabulary resources, but these have yet to be fully leveraged to promote disciplinary literacy within the secondary school context. For example, the focus of most previous wordlists has been on general academic vocabulary or the discipline-specific vocabulary needed in tertiary education. The current research contributes a series of discipline-specific wordlists for secondary school education, the Secondary School Vocabulary Lists (SVL), covering eight core subjects: Biology, Chemistry, Economics, English, Geology, History, Mathematics, and Physics. Further, the SVL goes beyond wordlists alone in developing accompanying word family and word association (i.e. collocation) lists for the disciplinary lexis. The SVL thus provides secondary education teachers with an unprecedented set of resources covering key vocabulary for the eight core disciplines informed by innovative EAP corpus methods.