Academic Vocabulary List for Undergraduate Students in Writing Undergraduate Theses: A Corpus-based Research

FISMA (F022182014) Academic Vocabulary List for Undergraduate Students in Writing Undergraduate Theses: A Corpus-based Research (supervised by Abidin Pammu and Ria Rosdiana Jubhari)
This is corpus-based research aiming to find out the word frequency which appears in the undergraduate theses based on Coxhead's word selection criteria; to find out the distribution of Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) and Gardner and Davies’ (2014) AVL in the undergraduate theses in Indonesia particularly in Education field and to establish new academic vocabularies for undergraduate students in writing undergraduate theses.
A 2.2-million word corpus was compiled comprising 200 undergraduate theses deriving from 10 universities in Indonesia. The LancsBox 5.0 software was exerted to calculate the word frequency and percentage of the text by applying the quantitative method.
By implementing Coxhead’s word selection criteria, only 1-million words which appear more than 63 times in the undergraduate theses and at least appearing 5 times from 5 universities. The research indicates that Coxhead’s AWL is as much as 8.95% (201,286), Gardner and Davies’ AVL is as much as 24.79% (557,658) and a new academic vocabulary is 4.46%. There are 268-word forms of AWL, 573-word forms of AWL, and 276 new academic vocabularies found in undergraduate theses. Moreover, AWL words, AVL words, and new academic vocabularies found in the undergraduate theses are accumulated into one list. In sum, 753 words become an academic vocabulary list for the students in writing their undergraduate theses. The total of those word appearances is 642,846 with a percentage of 28.75% of the total of word appearances in the corpus. Based on the findings of the results, it can be concluded that Coxhead’s academic word distribution in undergraduate theses of English education is still low compared with the distribution of AWL in other fields, while Gardner and Davies’ AVL still contains many general high-frequency words. The new academic vocabulary in this study still needs to be developed. Therefore, it is recommended to improve the development of academic vocabulary lists particularly in the more specific department such as English Education by involving more relevant academic texts. It is also important to consider the words that unfamiliar utilized by the students but high frequency used by native speakers or academicians in writing academic papers.