Academic Vocabulary of EFL Students’ Writing: A Corpus-based Study

Abstract

Academic writing is widely believed to have an objective, impersonal, informational view and has a variety of words. The goal is to make readers lighter and faster to understand the content of academic writing. Thus, this study aims at investigating the most frequently used academic words in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom setting. The authors analyze a corpus of 24 students’ writing assignments on argumentative essays. Since this research applies a corpus-based approach, the researchers use Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List to identify the frequency of those words that appear in students’ writing. Then the data is transcribed using AntWordProfiller software and analyzed as a description statistic data. The subject of the study is the fourth semester of Diploma 3 students who were selected with the purposive sampling method. The finding indicates a low variety of academic word families used with the low frequency in this corpus. This study contributes to the search of how non-native speaker writers use academic vocabulary in their work