A Study of Academic Vocabulary Use by Advanced EFL University Students

Abstract

Academic writing is one of the most essential skills for university students’ success during and beyond their study. Successful academic writing requires having peculiar grammatical and lexical features. One of the best-known features of academic writing style is the use of academic words. In light of these facts, the current study has been conducted to explore different aspects of academic words use by EFL students. The main aim of the study is to discover how proficient the students are in using academic words in general. In addition, the study aims to know the size and frequency of academic words that students demonstrate in their writing. It is also expected from the study to gain insight into students’ vocabulary knowledge through using academic words. Making students’ academic word list (hereafter AWL) and classifying them based on the Coxhead’s sub-lists is the ultimate goal of the study. For this purpose, a specialized corpus of 34 argumentative essays was collected from advanced EFL students. The essays were analyzed and interpreted by a well-established web-based corpus tool, ‘Text Inspector’. An outstanding conclusion drawn from the study is that the Kurdish EFL students of advanced level have a satisfactory proficiency in using academic words in general. Although the size of academic vocabulary observed in the essays is relatively small, students have proved their determined vocabulary knowledge as most of the used words are among the high frequency ones and contain various derivational forms.