Practice: core, academic & discipline-specific?
time to complete: 15-20 minutes
Now, it’s time for some practice. Obviously, you can use the tools we talked about earlier (see links below), but it’d also be interesting to see if you can identify these types of vocabulary in a text. This will raise your awareness of the fact that we need these tools and lists because it is not easy to say if a word is academic or not just by relying on our intuition.
Task: Read the extract below and identify core, academic and discipline-specific words. Then, complete the task that follows before you read the explanation.
Electronic and Electrical Engineering (EEE)
In this article, we clarify the theoretical relationship in a very simple form between the turbulence spectrum, which is directly associated with the variance of turbulence, two-way beam patterns, and the observed spectrum, using autocorrelation functions (ACFs).
Text adapted from Nishimura et al. (2020)
As you can see, the majority of the words are core and academic vocabulary, not discipline-/topic-specific.
- Words in the Oxford 3000 (core)
- Words in the OPAL (academic)
- Words in the Oxford 3000 and the OPAL
- Words that are discipline-/topic specific
- Other words
In this article, we clarify the theoretical relationship in a very simple form between the turbulence spectrum, which is directly associated with the variance of turbulence, two-way beam patterns, and the observed spectrum, using autocorrelation functions (ACFs).
Task: Read the extract below and identify core, academic and discipline-specific words. Then, complete the task that follows before you read the explanation.
Law
Although local prosecutors repeatedly acknowledged that labor trafficking existed in their communities, they said that such cases were not being investigated because the public did not call to report them and because the police had not identified any cases where there was clear evidence that victims had been coerced, defrauded, or forced to labor.
Text adapted from Farrell, Owens & McDevitt (2013)
As you can see, the majority of the words are core and academic vocabulary, not discipline-/topic-specific.
- Words in the Oxford 3000 (core)
- Words in the OPAL (academic)
- Words in the Oxford 3000 and the OPAL
- Words that are discipline-/topic specific
- Other words
Although local prosecutors repeatedly acknowledged that labor trafficking existed in their communities, they said that such cases were not being investigated because the public did not call to report them and because the police had not identified any cases where there was clear evidence that victims had been coerced, defrauded, or forced to labor.
To sum up
It is very important to find the right balance of vocabulary types in your writing. As we’ve seen, the majority of words in texts are words from the Oxford 3000 and words from the Oxford Phrasal Academic Lexicon. So, perhaps your priority is to learn academic words such as ‘account’, ‘basis’, ‘certain’, ‘decline’, ‘element’, ‘function’, etc. because they play an essential role in writing or speaking in all academic disciplines.