熱門論文
最新論文
基于自建語料庫的中外課程與教學論博士論文摘要的 對比研究
發布時間：2022-12-08 10:25
Contents
Abstract................................................................................................................................. i
摘 要............................................................................................................................... ii
Contents...............................................................................................................................iii
Chapter One Introduction.................................................................................................. 5
1.1 Research Background................................................................................................... 5
1.2 Purposes of the Study.................................................................................................... 6
1.3 Structure of the Study................................................................................................... 6
Chapter Two Literature Review........................................................................................ 7
2.1 Academic Words and Academic Word List ............................................................... 7
2.1.1 Definition of Academic Words..................................................................................................7
2.1.2 The Creation of Academic Word List........................................................................................8
2.1.3 Previous Study on Academic Word List....................................................................................8
2.1.4 The Shortcomings of Research on Academic Word Lists .........................................................9
2.2 Abstract........................................................................................................................ 10
2.2.1 Definition of Abstract..............................................................................................................10
2.2.2 Previous Study on Abstract .....................................................................................................10
2.2.3 Limitations of Previous Studies on Abstracts..........................................................................11
2.3 The Relationship between Academic Word List and Abstract............................... 12
2.4 Summary...................................................................................................................... 12
2.5 Innovations of the Study............................................................................................. 13
Chapter Three Research Methodology ........................................................................... 14
3.1 Research Purposes and Research Questions ............................................................ 14
3.2 Corpus Used in This Study......................................................................................... 14
3.2.1 The Introduction of Self-built Corpus — Curriculum and Introduction Corpus.....................14
3.2.1.1 The Building Stage of Curriculum and Instruction Corpus.................................................... 15
3.2.1.2 The Generating of Word Frequency List................................................................................ 16
3.2.2 Introduction of Research Instruments .....................................................................................16
3.3 Research Design........................................................................................................... 18
3.3.1 Data Collection........................................................................................................................18
3.3.2 Corpus-based Research Method..............................................................................................18
Chapter Four Results and Discussion ............................................................................. 20
4.1 The Topic Selection in Curriculum and Instruction................................................ 20
4.1.1 The Topic Selection in Domestic Curriculum and Instruction ................................................20
4.1.2 The Topic Selection in Foreign Curriculum and Instruction...................................................21
4.1.3 Summary .................................................................................................................................21
4.2 The Academic Vocabulary in Curriculum and Instruction.................................... 22
4.2.1 The Academic Vocabulary in Domestic Curriculum and Instruction......................................22
4.2.2 The Academic Vocabulary in Foreign Curriculum and Instruction.........................................23
4.2.3 The Special Terms of Curriculum and Instruction...................................................................23
4.2.4 Summary .................................................................................................................................25
4.3 The High-Frequency Vocabulary in Curriculum and Instruction......................... 26
4.3.1 The High-Frequency Vocabulary in Domestic Curriculum and Instruction............................26
iii
4.3.1.1 The Top 30 Nouns of Domestic Curriculum and Instruction..................................................26
4.3.1.2 The Top 5 Verb Families of Domestic Curriculum and Instruction........................................27
4.3.2 The High-Frequency Vocabulary in Foreign Curriculum and Instruction .............................. 28
4.3.2.1 The Top 30 Nouns of Foreign Curriculum and Instruction.....................................................29
4.3.2.2 The Top 5 Verb Families of Foreign Curriculum and Instruction...........................................29
4.3.3 Summary................................................................................................................................. 30
Chapter Five Conclusion...................................................................................................32
5.1 Major Findings & Conclusions...................................................................................32
5.1.1 Major Findings........................................................................................................................ 32
5.1.2 Conclusions ............................................................................................................................ 32
5.2 Implications on Topic Selection..................................................................................34
5.2.1 Educational Technology.......................................................................................................... 34
5.2.2 TESOL — Language Output Teaching................................................................................... 35
5.3 Implications on Thesis Writing Course .....................................................................35
5.4 Limitations and Advice for Further Research ..........................................................36
References...........................................................................................................................37
Acknowledgements.............................................................................................................39
Appendix A: Figures in the Study ....................................................................................40
Appendix B: Domestic Curriculum and Instruction Word Frequency List ................48
Appendix C: Foreign Curriculum and Instruction Word Frequency List...................57
The List of the Research Papers Published by Author...................................................63
iv
Corpus-Based Comparative Research in the Abstracts of Curriculum and Instruction Doctoral Dissertations by
Chinese and Foreign Students
Chapter One Introduction
This chapter mainly introduces the background, the purposes, and the main structure of the study.
1.1 Research Background
Academic words are viewed as a significant part in academic papers and dissertations. In the year
of 2000, Coxhead generated an academic word list with 570 word families in total, and from then
on, many researchers involved themselves in studies on Coxhead’s Academic Word List.
Furthermore, Coxhead and Nation (2001) claimed that academic words always covered about 8.5%
to 10% of the running words in academic papers. In the year of 2016, Zhang (2016) studied the
coverage on abstracts in Applied Linguistic Master dissertations by corpus-based research
methods, and her research results proved that the academic words occupied 12.89% of the running
words in abstracts of Applied Linguistic Master dissertations. However, in the last ten years, some
researchers found that Coxhead’s Academic Word List (AWL) cannot suit some certain discipline
such as Applied Linguistics. Therefore, based on Coxhead’s Academic Word List, more and more
linguists tended to generate more suitable word lists in their own research fields, such as
Vongpumivitch, et al. (2009). They found that there were 128 none-AWL words which are repeated
at least 50 times in journals of Applied Linguistics.
However, many scholars only select journals or Master dissertations as the research
content to complete their research, and still no one has done this kind of research on Doctoral
dissertations. Inspired by Vongpumivitch et al, there may exist some other non-AWL words in
abstracts of Curriculum and Instruction Doctoral dissertations. Thus, in order to know the
academic words coverage on abstracts of Curriculum and Instruction Doctoral dissertations, this
research comes into being. In addition, given that the abstract is regarded as a summary of the
whole dissertation, the present study chooses the abstract as the material to explore the coverage
of academic vocabulary in Curriculum and Instruction by corpus-based research methods. At the
same time, this study comparatively analyzes the similarities and differences in the use of academic
vocabulary in the abstracts of dissertations at home and abroad.
Moreover, an excellent topic is undoubtfully the highlight of a dissertation, but many
students have difficulty in generating a creative idea. Most of the existing dissertation topics in
Curriculum and Instruction in China are mainly based on some limited teaching theories, which
leads to too much uniformity and poor innovation in this discipline. Thus, this study focuses on
comparing the topic selections on abstracts of domestic and foreign dissertations, aiming to vary
the topic selection in domestic dissertations, so as to facilitate students to select a creative and
suitable topic on thesis writing.
To sum up, this study uses corpus-based and comparative analysis as the research method,
takes the abstracts of domestic and foreign Curriculum and Instruction Doctoral dissertations as
research contents, sets the topic selection and academic vocabulary of abstracts in Curriculum and
Instruction Doctoral dissertations at home and abroad as the research objectives, aiming to explore
the coverage of academic vocabulary and to vary topic selection in domestic Curriculum and
Instruction dissertations writing.
5
M. E. d Thesis of Bohai University
1.2 Purposes of the Study
The study has two main purposes.
On one hand, it tries to give students and teachers some implications in thesis writing and
thesis writing course by analyzing the abstracts of Doctoral dissertations in Curriculum and
Instruction (C&I) at home and abroad, especially in topic selection part. The present dissertations’
topics in domestic C&I are limited to certain teaching theories, such as Scaffolding, etc. This
makes domestic dissertations unitary, with little innovation and less practical value. And if the
topic selections of foreign dissertations in recent years can be generalized, this will undoubtedly
help domestic students to better select topics in C&I. At the same time, it can also help teachers to
give students more scientific topic selection guidance in thesis writing course.
On the other hand, the study seeks to help teachers better teach academic vocabularies in
thesis writing course and to make some tentative adaption to the Academic Word List (AWL) of
Coxhead (2000), so that the AWL can be more suitable applied to this field. Obviously, it has been
nearly twenty years since Coxhead’s AWL was established, and many new disciplines have
emerged in those twenty years. Curriculum and Instruction is one of them. Although the AWL
covered a wide range of disciplines, it cannot be applied to all disciplines, especially to the new
discipline C&I. Thus, by analyzing the coverage of academic words in this field, the thesis will
find some non-AWL words, and this will be an innovation of this study. What’s more, by analyzing
the usages of academic words, the study can help teachers better teach the academic vocabularies
in their thesis writing course. And it will also indirectly but effectively increase the usage of
academic vocabularies in students’ thesis writing.
1.3 Structure of the Study
The study is mainly composed of five chapters.
Chapter one introduces the background, the aims and the main structure of the study.
Chapter two is literature review which mainly introduces the definition of the key terms,
previous studies on academic words and academic word list, previous studies on abstracts, and the
innovations of the study.
Chapter three is the research methodology of the study. It is composed of three sections:
the research purposes and research questions, the corpus of this study, and the research design. In
this chapter, the processes of corpora generation will be described in details. What’s more, the two
word lists ranked by “frequency”, i.e. Chinese Word List and Foreign Word List will be created
too. And the introduction on research software and their pictures of AntConc and Range will also
be listed.
Chapter four is the results and discussion of the study, which mainly deals with the data
analysis and the results of data. The three research questions of this study will be answered in this
chapter. What’s more, the coverage of Coxhead’s AWL in domestic Curriculum and Instruction
Corpus and Foreign Curriculum and Instruction Corpus, the high frequency words in domestic
CIC and foreign CIC and the results of topic classification will also be included in this chapter.
Chapter five summarizes the main findings, gives implications and suggestions on thesis
writing to Chinese students and thesis writing course to Chinese teachers of Curriculum and
Instruction. What’s more, the limitations and advice for further research will be introduced too.
6
Corpus-Based Comparative Research in the Abstracts of Curriculum and Instruction Doctoral Dissertations by
Chinese and Foreign Students
Chapter Two Literature Review
There are four sections in this chapter. Section 2.1 introduces academic words and academic word
list, section 2.2 focuses on the abstracts, section 2.3 explains the relationship between academic
word list and abstract, section 2.4 summarizes the problems on previous studies on AW L and
abstracts, and section 2.5 demonstrates the innovations of the present study.
2.1 Academic Words and Academic Word List
This section comprises four parts. The first part of this section introduces the definition of
academic words. The second part shows the creation of Academic Word List. The third part
demonstrates an overview of the previous studies on Academic Word List. Moreover, the last part
points out the shortcomings of research on Academic Word List.
2.1.1 Definition of Academic Words
“Academic word or academic vocabulary is a term that is variety used in textbooks on English for
academic purposes and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) reference books (Paquot, 2010: 7)”.
However, it can be understood in a variety of ways and used to refer different categories of
vocabulary. Barber (1962) defined it as “generally useful scientific vocabulary”, and Cowan
(1974), Yang (1986) and Anderson (1980) defined it as “sub-technical vocabulary”. What’s more,
Cohen (1998) et al. defined it as “specialized non-technical lexis”. But it is Martin who first put
forward the term “academic vocabulary” to represent the category of words.
Even though the descriptions of its definition are different, they indeed refer to the same
category of words. In general, if a paper or dissertation belongs to the “science and technology”
discipline, researchers are willing to use the term “sub-technical” or “semi-technical” vocabulary
to represent this kind of words (Barber, 1962). However if the research field is not confined to the
area of “science and technology” where the “social science” is also included or the research can
be categorized to the “social science” studies, it is inappropriate to use the “sub-technical” or
“semi-technical” vocabulary to represent these words. In this case, the researchers are more willing
to use the term “academic vocabulary” to describe them (Martin, 1976; Coxhead, 2000).
Compared with high-frequency words and technical words, academic words are more
important as they have some specific functions. The academic words refer to the high proportion
of running words in all kinds of academic papers, and mastering these words is an integral part of
learners who want to learn deeper in a particular area in English (Coxhead & Nation, 2001:254).
In general, “academic vocabulary” refers to the kind of words which are relatively frequently
shown in academic papers or academic texts, and they do not belong to West’s (1953) General
Service List of English Words (GSL).
7
M. E. d Thesis of Bohai University
2.1.2 The Creation of Academic Word List
General Service List of English Words (GSL) was created by West (1953) from a five million-word
corpus of written English and contained nearly 2000 words families. According to a variety of
studies, the GSLprovided coverage of up to 92 percent of fiction texts (i.e. Hirsh and Nation, 1992)
and up to 76 percent of academic texts (Coxhead, 2000). The GSL has had a wide influence for
many years around the world. However, the GSL had limitations considering its age, coverage, etc.
Although the GSL was available to educational purposes, it cannot suit the development of
academic words and the change of times. Thus, at that time many scholars turned to generate
academic word lists only to meet the specific needs of teachers and students in higher education
settings.
Corpus is a research method that uses a computer to process, retrieve, index, and analyzes
a large number of corpora. It takes a large amount of real language data as a research object,
analyzes language facts from a macro perspective, and observes the real situation of language
being used in daily life. The generation of corpus provides a new way to learn and study languages.
English corpus linguistic research can be roughly divided into three stages. 1) In the stage of the
establishment and development of the corpora, the 18th century was called the Manual Corpus
Period, and the research methods at that time were still in the stage of card making and manual
retrieval. 2) From the 1960s to 1990s, the development of computer science greatly promoted the
development of corpora, which led to the generation of the First Generation of Electronic Corpora.
Since then, countries have begun to create their own corpora: the General Service List of English
Words (West, 1953) and University Wo rd List (Xue & Nation, 1984) were created in this period. 3)
From the 1990s till now, the Second Generation of Electronic Corpora had emerged. During this
period, the construction and research of corpora had developed rapidly. In this corpora
development background, Coxhead’s Academic Word List (AWL) had come into being.
The influential academic word list was created by Coxhead in the year 2000. It was named
“Academic Word List”, or “AWL” for short. The AWL was created from “3.5 million running
words of written academic texts by examining the range and frequency of words outside the first
2000 most frequency occurring words of English, as described by West (1953)” (Coxhead, 2000).
The AWL contained 570 word families, took the coverage of 10.00% of academic papers and 1.4%
of the fictions.
2.1.3 Previous Study on Academic Word List
Coxhead’s in 2000 was the theoretical base of research on academic word list. After that, all
research methods related to academic vocabulary were basically the same as those of Coxhead
(2000), except that the research fields, materials and sample size were different.
Coxhead’s (2000) study described the development and evaluation of a new academic
word list. Her AWL was generated from a corpus of 3.5 million running words of written academic
texts and contained 570 word families that account for nearly 10.0% of the total word tokens in
academic texts. Coxhead claimed that the AWL can show learners with academic goals which
words were most worth studying. In other words, the aim of generating an academic word list was
to guide students’ vocabulary learning. What’s more, her Academic Word List can also “provide a
useful basis for further research into the nature of academic vocabulary” (Coxhead, 2000: 213).
Coxhead (2000: 213) claimed that “one of the most challenging aspects of vocabulary
learning and teaching in English for academic purposes (EAP) programmes is making principled
decisions about which words are worth focusing on during valuable class and independent study
8
Corpus-Based Comparative Research in the Abstracts of Curriculum and Instruction Doctoral Dissertations by
Chinese and Foreign Students
time.” That is what an academic word list means. Coxhead’s corpus contained four sub-corpora:
Arts, Commerce, Law and Science, with each sub-corpora containing nearly 875,000 running
words. As the AWL involved too many disciplines, it was difficult to fully suit a particular
discipline. Vongpumivitch, Huang and Chang’s (2009) research on the AWL in the field of Applied
Linguistics found that there exist some non-AWL words.
Same as Coxhead’s, Vongpumivitch’s study (2009) was also a corpus-based lexical study,
and it aimed to explore the use of words in Coxhead’s AWL in journal articles in Applied
Linguistics. The corpus they generated contained 1.5 million running words of 200 research
articles in total. Their results showed that the Coxhead’s AWL account for 11.17% of their corpus.
Although most of the AWL word forms was included in Coxhead’s, they still found 128 non-AWL
words that were used for more than 50 times in their corpus, and those 128 non-AWL word forms
were specialized terms in the field of Applied Linguistics. That showed the limitations of
Coxhead’s AWL, and the significance of generating an academic word list in some specific
research fields.
Sun and Lei’s (2013) study investigated the use of academic lexical items and their
features in the academic writing of economics journal papers. Their corpus contained 907,380
running words from 120 journal papers from economics journals which were written by native
English speakers. The results showed that the AWL accounted for 12.74% of the word tokens in
their corpus. They claimed that the AWL was not as important as it claimed to be in academic
economic writings. However, “GSL and Academic Keyword List (AKL, Paquot, 2010) words
played a more crucial role in discourse organization and connection” (Sun & Lei, 2013: 365). In
other words, even if Coxhead had collected corpus of economics when she established AWL, it
was not completely related to the writing of economics academic papers based on Sun and Lei
(2013). Thus, a slight adjustment to the AWL based on different disciplines is necessary and has
theoretical base.
2.1.4 The Shortcomings of Research on Academic Word Lists
In view of the previous studies, although Coxhead’s research covers four research fields and many
disciplines, and a large sample corpus research method has been used to sort out an Academic
Word List with 570 word families, it still exist shortcomings. The following conclusions can be
drawn:
Although the AWL covers many disciplines, it is not completely applicable to a specific
discipline. According to the research by Vongpumivitch, et al, as far as Applied Linguistics is
concerned, there are still 128 non-AWL word families. They use the same research methods as
Coxhead, i.e. large sample corpus-based research methods. This can prove that AWL needs to be
updated for better application in the field of Applied Linguistics.
AWL can only be used as a reference for academic thesis writing, and the specific
applications should be changed accordingly for different disciplines. Sun and Lei’s research proves
that the AWL should not be the only reference for Economics academic papers writing, and GSL
and AKL should also be considered.
AWL needs to make corresponding adjustments so that it can be better applied to the new
emerging discipline of Curriculum and Instruction.
Based on the above shortcomings of AWL, the present study intends to match the AWL
to the vocabularies in the abstracts of the Doctoral dissertations of the Curriculum and Instruction
by corpus-based research methods. This research fills the blank in the studies related to Curriculum
and Instruction.
9
M. E. d Thesis of Bohai University
2.2 Abstract
This section contains the definition of the abstract, the previous studies on the abstract and the
limitations of the previous studies.
2.2.1 Definition of Abstract
Abstract is one of the components of a dissertation. In the discipline of Applied Linguistic, a
dissertation is usually composed of six body parts: Abstract and Keywords, Introduction,
Literature Review, Research Methodology, Result and Discussion, and Conclusion. As the first
body part of a dissertation, the abstract has a significant position. It is not only the first part that a
reader will read, but also an epitome of a paper. When reading a large number of papers, readers
will choose to read the content of the abstract first to determine whether the article is suitable for
their own research needs. In other words, the quality of the abstract of a paper can seriously affect
the readers’ reading.
Different people have different definitions of the abstract. Swales (1990) argued that
abstract is a pre-instruction of the content which can foreshadow the content and the structure of
an academic paper. Cleveland (1983:104) argued that an abstract summarizes the core of a special
knowledge record and was a real substitute for this article. What’s more, International standards
ISO214-76 described the abstract as “an abbreviated, accurate representation of the contents of a
document without added interpretation or criticism.”
Although all of the statements about the definition of the abstract were consistent at the
theoretical level, their emphasis was different. Swales argued that the abstract needs to herald the
entire academic paper, while Cleveland believed that abstracts must contain important information
throughout the academic paper. According to the international standard, an abstract can only state
the views in the paper honestly and no comments should be included. To sum up, the abstract of
an academic paper can be defined as: an abbreviated, accurate representation of the contents of an
academic paper without any added interpretation or criticism, and the location of the abstract is in
front of the body of the thesis or after the conclusion of the academic paper; additionally, it must
be a separately paragraph.
2.2.2 Previous Study on Abstract
Abstracts were applied to medical papers in the 1960s. Prior to that, most articles had no abstract.
After the 1960s, the use of abstracts in academic papers gradually spread to other disciplines. As
more and more publications require that abstracts must be contained in published papers, abstracts
are gradually refined into three forms: descriptive abstracts, evaluative abstracts and informative
abstracts.
Cleveland (1983) was the first scholar who published research about abstracts in the world.
He believed that an abstract summarizes the core of a particular knowledge record and was a true
alternative to the article. Gratoz (1985) claimed that an abstract, used for readers to find
components of an article without reading the full text and know the structure of an article in
advance, was a time-saving structure; it can helps readers go deeper in the article. He believed that
as long as an abstract was comprehensive enough, it can be an alternative to reading the full text.
Swales (1990), a leader in abstracts genre analysis started a long wave of abstracts genre analysis.
The use of abstracts in academic journal papers in China only began in the 1980s, and
10
Corpus-Based Comparative Research in the Abstracts of Curriculum and Instruction Doctoral Dissertations by
Chinese and Foreign Students
most of them were Chinese abstracts. In the late 1990s, the research on abstracts appeared in China.
Over the past ten years, major domestic journals have gradually required abstracts in both Chinese
and English, and domestic scholars have paid more and more attention to abstracts. The studies on
abstracts in China focused on the following aspects:1) Structural comparison analysis of abstracts
in Chinese and foreign journals or the format and rules of abstracts; 2）Exploring the different
expression habits of Chinese and English abstracts and the expression of various professional
terms in the abstracts; 3) Grammar and other grammatical features of English abstracts; 4)
Research on abstracts from the perspective of Chinese-English Translation. However, the most
obvious deficiency of the research on abstracts is the lack of empirical research and the small size
of the samples.
Niu (2013a) investigated Chinese and English abstracts of academic papers from a new
perspective by using a large sample research method with the combination of advanced corpus and
computer technology. She found that the moves of the English abstracts of foreign academic
journals were more complete, the distributions of moves were relatively balanced and the
expressing was objective. However, the moves of domestic abstracts were not complete, and the
distributions of moves were not balanced and more subjective. According to Montesi (2005), in
2006, there were only 28 studies related to abstracts in the whole world. Nowadays, the research
on abstracts at home and abroad has involved in all levels of such many research fields as
linguistics, editing, culture, and communication. In other words, the study of abstract is a popular
topic selection in the world. Therefore, research on abstracts is in line with the trend of times.
In the year 2013, Niu (2013b) published a monograph which contains the definition of
abstracts and genre, etc. In that monograph, she had a systematic discussion on the process of
studying the abstract of the academic journals through corpus-based research method. However,
she only generated a word list and keyword list in her investigation (p.61-68) and she did not do
any depth research on it, especially the research on academic words. What’s more, the corpus she
used were selected from journals of Applied Linguistic at home and abroad, the time period was
from the year 2008 to 2010, and the word number of abstracts she used were varying from 150 to
250. Furthermore, the ranges of corpus were Health Sciences, Life Science and Biomedical
Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences, Physical Sciences and Engineering and Language
Sciences and Literature.
Xu (2017) collected 100 abstracts (2012-2014) of Bachelor’s degree dissertations from
the Universities of “211” Project and 100 abstracts (2012-2014) of Bachelor’s degree dissertations
from Luoyang Institute of Science and Technology, generated two word lists ranked by frequency
and found that the top 20 words of the two word lists had no significant difference. But in the case
of complexity of vocabulary and sentence length, the abstracts from Universities of “211” Project
is better than Luoyang Institute of Science and Technology.
The above studies all used corpus-based research methods and were based on large-
sample scale. However, the study of abstracts on English major dissertations has been limited to
genre analysis or genre contrast analysis between Chinese and foreign countries, as well as
discourse construction or grammar analysis. Studies of academic vocabularies in abstracts are still
need to be explored.
2.2.3 Limitations of Previous Studies on Abstracts
The shortcomings of domestic research on abstracts can be seen as:
At first, domestic academic papers’ adoption of abstracts which did not appear until the
1980s started later than that of foreign countries. At that time, very few journals used abstracts,
and almost all of them were written in Chinese where English abstracts are rarely seen. Domestic
research on abstracts started later than 1990s. The reason of domestic scholars’increasing attention to abstracts is that the domestic publications’ requirements of an article which should both have
11
M. E. d Thesis of Bohai University
Chinese and English abstracts. Thus, the quantity and quality of the studies on abstracts has
gradually increased, too.
Secondly, the content of domestic research on academic abstract is rigid. Most of
domestic studies are concerned on the structural comparison of Chinese and English abstracts
between Chinese and foreign academic journals, or the format and rules of the abstract, or the
different expression habits of the Chinese and English abstracts and the expression of various
professional terms in the abstract. Some papers about abstracts published on Modern Foreign
Languages focus on the voice, tense and other grammatical features of the English abstract; what’s
more, some papers study abstracts from the perspective of Chinese-English translation.
At last, although the number of studies on abstracts has gradually increased in recent years,
the quality of the research is not good enough. The most obviously shortcoming of domestic
studies on abstracts lies in the lack of empirical research. Although there are some monograph
about abstracts, most of them only concern the writing skills and steps of abstracts whereas none
of them uses empirical research methods.
2.3 The Relationship between Academic Word List and Abstract
Since Coxhead generated the Academic Word List, academic vocabulary has attracted relevant
scholars’ attention at home and abroad. Many scholars have studied the application of AWL, the
construction of AWL on specific fields, and the functions of using academic words. Studies have
shown that academic vocabulary covers about 10% of vocabulary in various academic discourse,
and has important textual and rhetorical functions.
Abstract, as an indispensable part of an independent academic discourse and dissertations,
plays an important role in introducing the research content, highlighting the research value, and
attracting readers’ interests of a thesis. The proper use of academic vocabulary in abstracts is one
of the decisive factors for the authenticity and consistency of abstracts. However, there is no related
research on the use of academic vocabulary in the abstracts of dissertations on Curriculum and
Instruction. In addition, the quality of the abstract also determines the exposure of a research paper.
Therefore, in order to fill the gap in the research of English for Special Purpose (ESP) in
Curriculum and Instruction and to improve thesis writing teaching of the abstract on thesis writing
course, this study decided to combine academic vocabulary with the abstract of dissertation.
2.4 Summary
Based on the previous research, the following conclusions can be summarized:
1) Academic vocabulary is used as a standard to measure the academic nature of a
dissertation, so doing research on academic vocabulary is very necessary.
2) Coxhead’s Academic Word List is too extensive and inexhaustible because it involves
too many research fields, and is not suitable for some new emerging disciplines in China.
3) The study of academic vocabulary at home and abroad is only limited to fields such
as Applied Linguistics and Medicine, etc, and does not involve Curriculum and Instruction.
12
Corpus-Based Comparative Research in the Abstracts of Curriculum and Instruction Doctoral Dissertations by
Chinese and Foreign Students
4) The studies on abstracts at home and abroad are mostly comparative analysis of genre
and abstract types or the grammatical features of abstracts. Moreover, the scale of research
samples is small and the studies are hardly empirical.
5) Study of academic vocabulary in the abstracts of Doctoral dissertations has not been
involved.
6) It is necessary to combine academic vocabulary research with abstracts.
2.5 Innovations of the Study
The present study considers the shortcomings of related research at home and abroad, and uses
corpus research methods to study academic vocabulary in the abstracts of domestic and foreign
Doctoral dissertations in Curriculum and Instruction. The aims of the present study are to guide
the students to learn vocabulary in a target manner, to help teachers prepare for the academic
thesis writing course of this major, and to improve the academic nature of the dissertations of this
major indirectly. In addition, inspired by the research of Vongpumivitch et al. (2009), based on the
specific research on academic vocabulary of Curriculum and Instruction, this study hopes to find
the special terms belonging to this major to enrich the Coxhead’s AWL. There are four innovations
of the study:
1. The study has a moderate sample size. The study collects 50 English abstracts in China
and 50 abroad to generate a small sample corpus and then lists frequency words list home and
abroad to do comparative research on frequency and range results of words between home and
abroad.
2. The study does some in-depth studies on the abstract part. Apart from the research on
frequency words, the study also does some research on topic selection and the usage of academic
vocabulary, etc.
3. The study tends to use Doctoral dissertations at home and abroad as samples. Some
domestic scholars tend to use Master dissertations or Bachelor dissertations as samples because
they are easier to get. However, in order to do some studies on academic words of one discipline,
choosing Doctoral dissertations is better than others, for there is no doubt that Ph.D theses are
more academic than the others.
4. The study holds a new research field. Throughout the research fields of Corpus
Linguistic and English for Special Purpose recently at home and abroad, the Curriculum and
Instruction discipline is still a shadow zone. Therefore, the study will apply the corpus research
method to study the Doctoral dissertations of this discipline, and try to make an academic attempt
to fill the gap.
13
M. E. d Thesis of Bohai University
Chapter Three Research Methodology
The whole chapter can be divided in to four parts. The first part is mainly about the description of
research questions needed to be answered in this study. The second part is the research design,
which includes the data collection, the introduction on the building stage of Curriculum and
Instruction Corpus and the introduction of research instruments. Part three introduces the corpora
used in this study. Part four deals with the research data processing and analysis procedures.
3.1 Research Purposes and Research Questions
The research questions of this study are shown as follows:
1). what are the differences of topic selection between the domestic and foreign abstracts
of the Curriculum and Instruction Doctoral dissertations?
2). what are the differences of academic vocabulary coverage between the domestic and
foreign abstracts of the Curriculum and Instruction Doctoral dissertations?
3). what are the differences of high-frequency vocabularies between the domestic and
foreign abstracts of the Curriculum and Instruction Doctoral dissertations?
According to section 1.2, the aims of this study are to explore some implications for
students and teachers on the thesis topic selection and thesis writing course by analyzing the
Doctoral dissertations of Curriculum and Instruction at home and abroad. At the same time, this
study applies corpus to generate the word frequency list of the abstract of the professional Doctoral
dissertations, compares the usage of academic vocabulary in the study of Chinese and foreign
Doctoral dissertations abstracts of C&I, and makes some tentative adaptations on Coxhead’s AWL
so that AWL can be better applied to the discipline.
3.2 Corpus Used in This Study
This section is mainly about the introduction of self-built corpus, including the collection of
materials, the procedure of cleaning materials and the stages of building this corpus.
3.2.1 The Introduction of Self-built Corpus — Curriculum and Introduction
Corpus
The self-built corpus Curriculum and Introduction Corpus (CIC) has two sub-corpora, they are
CCIC (Chinese Curriculum and Instruction Corpus) and FCIC (Foreign Curriculum and
Instruction Corpus). Thus, the building stage of CIC should be divided into two parts: the foreign
part — FCIC and the Chinese part — CCIC. Both of the FCIC and CCIC contain 50 abstracts
which are extracted from the Doctoral dissertations of Curriculum and Instruction during the year
2014 to 2017.
14
Corpus-Based Comparative Research in the Abstracts of Curriculum and Instruction Doctoral Dissertations by
Chinese and Foreign Students
3.2.1.1 The Building Stage of Curriculum and Instruction Corpus
A. The Corpus Collection
The materials collection is a long-time journey. During the year 2017 to 2018, the writer
uses the whole time to collect materials in order to generate this corpus.
In fact, the materials of Chinese part are easier than that of the foreign part. All the
Chinese materials are from CNKI (http: www.cnki.net) and the way of searching is unified: open
the web site www.cnki.net then enter the Doctoral dissertations and search by majors, then input
the Chinese name of “Curriculum and Instruction” — “課程與教學論” and choose the year from
2014-2017, then randomly download 50 pieces of dissertations closely connected with English
Major. Then, the English abstract part will be extracted from those 50 dissertations which compose
the domestic Curriculum and Instruction Corpus. Except for different dissertations download
platforms, foreign corpus extraction methods are the same as domestic ones. Foreign corpus is
downloaded from ProQuest database.
What’s more, in order to better distinguish these papers, the author randomly numbered
Chinese and foreign papers at 1 to 50 separately. The two pictures can show the randomly
numbered of these dissertations (samples from number 1 to 25).
Fig. 3.1 The Samples of CCIC 1-25 Fig. 3.2 The Samples of FCIC 1-25
B. The Material Converting
According to Liang (2017), the second procedure of building a corpus is cleaning. But
before cleaning, these corpora need to be converted into a format that can be cleaned. Based on
the Figure 3.1 and 3.2, because the different format of the original corpora between CCIC and
FCIC, the converting procedures are different.
The format of dissertations of CCIC is CAJ, the converting procedures are slightly
complicated. Taking the first article as an example, firstly, the author opens an article of CCIC,
and finds the English Abstract part. Next the author finds the “text recognition” in the toolbar and
then uses this tool to select paragraph one by one and check whether it is correct or not. If not, the
author will correct manually. The third procedure is pasting everything that has been corrected into
the doc. document one paragraph by one paragraph until the whole abstract is finished. The last
procedure is to paste the abstract into the Txt Document. In a word, the processes of converting
CCIC is CAJ. → DOC. (with the tool- text recognition) → TXT.
However, the FCIC is easier to be converting. It is easy to find in picture 3.1 that the
format of articles in CCIC is PDF, which are easily to be converted. The first article will be used
as an example to examine the steps for text conversion. The first step is using Adobe Acrobat Pro
DC to open the first article. And then press File→ Export to→ Microsoft Word→ Word 97-2003
in the toolbar and contrast the Abstract part to the original format and then check whether it is right
or not. If not, the author will correct them one by one manually. The last step is to paste the whole
Abstract to Text Document. For short, the processes of converting FCIC are PDF. → DOC. →
TET.
15
M. E. d Thesis of Bohai University
C. The Corpus Cleaning
In fact, all the articles should be cleaned for three times. The first cleaning is in the DOC.
Document stage. The author uses Find tools in the toolbar to clear extra spaces, extra empty lines,
and convert full-width characters to half-width characters. And the second cleaning is in the TXT
Document stage. To ensure that nothing is lost, in this stage the article should be checked whether
all the items are cleared. The third cleaning is an inspection after all articles are cleaned.
D. The Generation of Raw Corpus — Curriculum and Instruction Corpus
In order to build CIC, the software AntConc should be used. Use AntConc to open files
and then to do some basic findings in it.
3.2.1.2 The Generating of Word Frequency List
This section is mainly about the processes of the generation of word frequency lists.
Fig. 3.3 CWFL Fig. 3.4 FWFL
The Chinese and Foreign word frequency lists are generated in the same process by
AntConc as following steps: press File→ Open Dir→ Tool Preferences→ Word List→ Treat All
Data as Lowercase → Use Lemma List→ File→ Lemma List File →Load→ Use Stop List Listed
Below → Add Words from File → Open → Word List → Start. The in-software tool preferences
are showed in figure 3.5.
Fig. 3.5 The Extraction of the Tool Preferences of Generating Word Frequency Lists
3.2.2 Introduction of Research Instruments
The main research softwares used in the study are AntConc and Range.
A. AntConc 3.2.1
In this study, AntConc was applied to do some basic search, generate the two word
frequency lists.
16
Corpus-Based Comparative Research in the Abstracts of Curriculum and Instruction Doctoral Dissertations by
Chinese and Foreign Students
Fig. 3.6 The Extraction of AntConc 3.2.1
AntConc is a very classic free corpus search and analysis tool. Initially, it is a simple
(basic) corpus search tool; however, with the developer — Laurence Anthony’s updating, it adds
a lot of other analyze functions like Concordance, Concordance Plot, File View, Clusters,
Collocates, Word List and Keyword List, etc. But the most important function is calculating the
Keynes of the keywords in the observed corpus equivalent to the reference corpus. Now, AntConc
is adopted by scholars in the field of Corpus Linguistics, Translation, and Foreign Language
Teaching, etc.
In this study, after cleaning the authentic 100 texts (in total), the author applied AntConc
to generate the raw corpus CIC and then to produce the Chinese and Foreign word frequency lists.
The specific processes of building them were explained in section 3.2.1.2. Although some other
softwares can also build the word frequency lists, AntConc is free and can do some basic searching
and easy to use, and that is why it is chosen in the study.
B. RANGE 32
RANGE initially is designed to compare the vocabulary of up to 32 different texts at the
same time. For each word in the texts, it provides a range or distribution figure (how many texts
the word occurs in), a headword frequency figure (the total number of times the actual headword
type appears in all the texts), a family frequency figure (the total number of times the word and its
family members occur in all the texts), and a frequency figure for each of the texts the word occurs
in. It can be used to find the coverage of a text by certain word lists, create word lists based on
frequency and range, and to discover shared and unique vocabulary in several pieces of writing.
RANGE can be used to compare a text against vocabulary lists to see what words are in
the text are and what are not, and to see what percentage of the items in the text are covered by the
lists. It can also be used to compare the vocabulary of two texts to see how much of the same
vocabulary they use and where their vocabulary differs.
It is useful for example for seeing what low frequency words are in an exam question
paper, a technical information note or a text aimed at foreign readers. It may also be used to check
the vocabulary of simplified reading texts or language course books to see how many of the words
in the texts are among the high frequency words of English. It may also be used to see how much
learning the vocabulary of one text helps deal with the words in a different text.
Searching for “Range Paul Nation” in Google, it is easy to find Paul Nation’s personal
website, two versions of software can be downloaded — Range_GSL_AWL.zip &
Range_BNC.zip. The first Range version has three base word lists named BASEWRD1.txt,
BASEWRD2. txt, and BASEWRD3. txt. What’s more, the first two base word lists contain West’s
A General Service List of English Words (1953) which contains 2000 word families. In addition,
the third base word list contains all the 570 word families in Academic Word List. Furthermore, it
is necessary to set the word “advertise” as an example here to explain the definition of the word
family: the word advertising, advertises, advertiser, advertisers, advertised, advertisement, and
advertisements can be concluded in the “advertise” family. That is to say, in calculating when the
17
M. E. d Thesis of Bohai University
word containing in “advertise” family appears, the number of appearances should be calculated to
“advertise” only. Although there are 570 word families in the third base word list, actually there
are 3107 different member words in it.
But in this comparative study, Range was supposed to analyze the difficulty of the two
corpora, calculate the coverage of academic words and compare the differences in difficulty in the
vocabulary used to write a paper of these two corpora. Figure 3.7 is the extraction of software
Range 32.
Fig. 3.7 The Extraction on Software Range 32
In addition, all the software and base word lists are from the book Using Corpora: A
Practical Coursebook (Liang et. al, 2010).
3.3 Research Design
The research design of this study adopts corpus-based method, specifically corpus-driven approach
and the materials are downloaded from ProQuest database (the materials abroad) and CNKI (the
materials at home) database.
3.3.1 Data Collection
In terms of the data collection, all the collection is based on the research instruments— Range 32
and AntConc. In section 3.2.2, the author has described how to use them, and all the data will be
generated automatically. The results will be pooled together in Chapter Four.
3.3.2 Corpus-based Research Method
In terms of the first research question: what does the comparison between Chinese and foreign
abstracts in terms of the topic selection of C&I, the author firstly listed all the titles and keywords
of Chinese and foreign dissertations. Then the manual classification was employed as the scale of
samples is small. The next step was to calculate the proportion of each topic category, and finally
comparing similarities and differences on topic selection during the year 2014 to 2017.
In order to solve the second research question: what are the differences of academic
18
Corpus-Based Comparative Research in the Abstracts of Curriculum and Instruction Doctoral Dissertations by
Chinese and Foreign Students
vocabulary coverage between the abstracts of domestic and foreign Curriculum and Instruction
dissertations, the two corpora were ranged by Range software with its own base word lists. And
the results of the words belonging to the third base word list showed the answer of this question
and the author separately listed the academic words of the two corpora and found out what are the
top used academic words of the two corpora. In addition, the author found out the top frequency
words of the 100 abstracts within their range results which were not being included in Coxhead’s
AWL. These words were labeled as special terms of C&I, and it was an innovation of this study.
In order to answer the third research question: what are the differences of high frequency
vocabulary between the abstracts of domestic and foreign Curriculum and Instruction dissertations.
The two word frequency lists of domestic and foreign abstracts were generated and the top 30
nouns and top five verb families of the two corpora were summarized. Then, some charts were
listed, which contains the differences and similarities of the two corpora in terms of the top 30
nouns and top 5 verb families.
19
M. E. d Thesis of Bohai University
Chapter Four Results and Discussion
This chapter is mainly about the results of the research designs described in Chapter three and the
analysis of the data. In addition, the structure of this chapter is based on the research questions of
the study. Section 4.1 is mainly about the topic selection in Curriculum and Instruction. Section
4.2 describes the academic vocabularies in Curriculum and Instruction. And section 4.3 is mainly
about the high-frequency words in Curriculum and Instruction.
4.1 The Topic Selection in Curriculum and Instruction
This section can be divided into three parts. Part one is the topic selection in domestic Curriculum
and Instruction. Part two is the topic selection in foreign Curriculum and Instruction. And part
three is the summary this section.
4.1.1 The Topic Selection in Domestic Curriculum and Instruction
Fig. 4.1 The Topic Selection in Domestic Curriculum and Instruction
Fig 4.1 shows the categories of topics, total number, and proportions of domestic Curriculum and
Instruction. As shown in the Fig. 4.1, the topic selection of domestic Curriculum and Instruction
can be divided into 10 categories, which are: “TESOL” (accounting for 26% of the domestic C&I),
“Language and Culture” (accounting for 8% of the domestic C&I), “Teacher” (accounting for 22%
of the domestic C&I), “Student” (2% of the domestic C&I), “Teacher-Student Relationship” (2%
of the domestic C&I), “Learning Strategies” (2% of the domestic C&I), “Curriculum” (8% of the
domestic C&I), “Pedagogy” (accounting for 20% of the domestic C&I), “Educator” (2% of the
domestic C&I) and “Textbooks” (8% of the domestic C&I). Based on these statistics, the hot topics
(the high frequency topics) are “Curriculum and Pedagogy” (28%), “TESOL” (26%) and the
20
Corpus-Based Comparative Research in the Abstracts of Curriculum and Instruction Doctoral Dissertations by
Chinese and Foreign Students
research about “Teachers” (22%). In addition, “TESOL” in domestic C&I can be further divided
into four directions: vocabulary, reading, translation and grammar. Among them, the research on
vocabulary accounts for the largest proportion.
4.1.2 The Topic Selection in Foreign Curriculum and Instruction
Fig. 4.2 The Topic Selection in Foreign Curriculum and Instruction
Fig. 4.2 indicates the types of topics, total number, and proportions of foreign Curriculum and
Instruction. According to Fig 4.2, the topic selection of Foreign Curriculum and Instruction (FCIC)
is divided into 14 categories. They are “Educational Technology” (accounting for 12% of FCIC),
“Curriculum and Pedagogy” (accounting for 44% of FCIC), “Teacher” (accounting for 8% of the
FCIC), “Student” (2% of FCIC), “Gamification” (2% of the FCIC), “TESOL” (6% of the FCIC),
“Educational Thinking” (2% of the FCIC), “Communication” (4% of the coverage), “Culture”
(2%), “Motivation” (2%), “Syllibi” (2%), “School” (4%), “Leadership” (6%) and “Educational
Policy” (4% of FCIC). Based on these statistics, the hot topics of foreign Curriculum and
Instruction are: “Curriculum & Pedagogy” (44%) and “Educational Technology” (12%). In
addition, “TESOL” in foreign C&I can be further divided into two directions: reading and writing.
4.1.3 Summary
To sum up, the topic selections in domestic Curriculum and Instruction and foreign Curriculum
and Instruction have some similarities and differences.
In terms of the similarities, they both have the same categories of topics such as “TESOL”,
“Curriculum & Pedagogy”, “Teacher”, “Student” and “Culture”. In addition, the research on
“Curriculum & Pedagogy” takes the largest proportion for both of them.
The differences between the two will be described in terms of macro and micro
perspectives. From a macro perspective, there are many types of foreign thesis topics, which are
relatively new. However, there are few types of domestic thesis topics, most of which are
conventional thesis topics like teachers, students, etc. From the micro perspective, there are five
differences between domestic and foreign thesis topics.
1) There are topics related to “Educational Technology” in the topic selection of foreign
21
M. E. d Thesis of Bohai University
dissertations, which account for a large proportion. However, there is no related research in
domestic dissertations.
2) The research directions of “TESOL” at home and abroad are different. Foreign research
on “TESOL” can be divided into two sub-categories: writing and reading. Domestic research on
“TESOL” can be divided into four sub-categories: vocabulary, reading, translation, and grammar.
The domestic “TESOL” topics are related to language input teaching. Conversely, foreign
“TESOL” topics have both language input teaching and language output teaching. In other words,
there is a lack of domestic topic selections in output language teaching.
3) There are many foreign topics that are not available in China, such as “School”,
“Educational Policy”, “Syllibi”, “Communication”, “Gamification”, and “Leadership”.
4) The distributions of studies on the stages of education are various. Foreign topics have
the study of early childhood teaching. However, there are studies on elementary school, junior
middle school, high school and university teaching in China, but no study on early childhood
teaching.
5) There is a large gap in the number of topics for “Teachers and Students” between home
and abroad. There are only 5 related studies abroad, accounting for 10% of the total, while 13
related domestic studies, accounting for 26% of the total.
4.2 The Academic Vocabulary in Curriculum and Instruction
This section can be divided into four parts. Part one is the academic vocabulary in domestic
Curriculum and Instruction. Part two is the academic vocabulary in foreign Curriculum and
Instruction. Part three is the special terms of Curriculum and Instruction. Part four is the summary
of the section.
4.2.1 The Academic Vocabulary in Domestic Curriculum and Instruction
Fig. 4.3 Range Results of Domestic Curriculum and Instruction
Fig 4.3 shows the Range results of domestic Curriculum and Instruction. The corpus of domestic
Curriculum and Instruction (CCIC) has 49,339 word tokens and 4,381 word types in total. Among
the 49,339 word tokens, 34,661 word tokens belongs to the first base-word list accounting for
70.25% of the total; 2,344 word tokens are in the second class vocabulary and accounting for 4.75 %
of the total; and 6,932 words belongs to the third class vocabulary and accounting for 14.05% of
the total. Because the third class vocabulary is the academic vocabulary of Coxhead (2000), the
academic vocabulary coverage in abstracts of domestic Curriculum and Instruction is 14.05%.
22
Corpus-Based Comparative Research in the Abstracts of Curriculum and Instruction Doctoral Dissertations by
Chinese and Foreign Students
What’s more, it also has 5,502 word which is not included in any base-word lists.
4.2.2 The Academic Vocabulary in Foreign Curriculum and Instruction
Fig 4.4 Range Results of Foreign Curriculum and Instruction
Fig. 4.4 shows the Range results of foreign Curriculum and Instruction. The corpus of foreign
Curriculum and Instruction (FCIC) has 10,015 word tokens of first class vocabulary and accounts
for 70.25% of the total word tokens. It has 7,806 word tokens belonging to the second class
vocabulary and accounts for 5.29 % of the total words. What’s more, there are 2,352 word tokens
belonged to the third class words and those words accounting for 15.45% of the total. In other
words, the academic word coverage in the abstracts of foreign Curriculum and Instruction is
15.45%. Last but not least, FCIC has 2,050 word tokens which are not included in any base word
lists and those words accounting for 13.48 % of the total word tokens. In general, FCIC has 15,229
word tokens and 2,661 word types.
4.2.3 The Special Terms of Curriculum and Instruction
Coxhead’s Academic Word List (2000) is evolved from four major disciplines which are Law, Arts,
Commerce and Science, but that corpus does not include Curriculum & Instruction. Therefore, the
AWL of Coxhead still needs to be improved especially in terms of the emerging discipline
Curriculum and Instruction. By analyzing the vocabulary of “not in lists” in the Range results at
home and abroad, it was found that there were 33 co-occurring words, and the emergency
frequency and range of those words were greater than twice (F≥2, R≥2). Among them, there
were only seven words related to “teaching”. They are “curriculum”, “feedback”, “pedagogy”,
“pedagogical”, “proficiency”, “reform”, “self-reflection”, and “score”. And these words were not
included in Coxhead’s AWL, so these words were special terms of Curriculum and Instruction.
Fig. 4.5 contains all the seven special terms of this discipline and their frequency, range, and
concordance results in domestic and foreign corpora.
“Curriculum”, a word that composes the name of the discipline, occupies a high frequency.
As the table shows, the frequency of it in CCIC is 339 and the range result is 19, while the
frequency in FCIC is 154 and the range result is 29, which means the high occurrence of
curriculum in CCIC and the low occurrence of cross-abstract, indicating the distribution is more
concentrated. Although the frequency of the distribution of that word in FCIC is less than that in
CCIC, the number of cross-article is more widely distributed than that in CCIC.
The distribution of “Feedback” in FCIC and CCIC is more average. They are five times of the frequency and four appearances of the range in CCIC and four times of the frequency and
23
M. E. d Thesis of Bohai University
four appearances of the cross-article distribution.
“Curriculum and Pedagogy” is another name of Curriculum and Instruction, but unlike
“curriculum”, “pedagogy” or “pedagogical” does not occupy as high as “curriculum” in CIC.
“Pedagogy’s” frequency in CCIC is nine times and its range result is seven; while in FCIC, its
frequency is nine times too and the range result is six. Those distribution results are more average
in CIC, which means the application of that word is similar. “Pedagogical” belongs to the same
word family with “pedagogy”, but its application in CCIC is different from that in FCIC. In CCIC,
the frequency of that word is 6 times and the cross-article result is three; in FCIC, the frequency
is eight times and the range result is three too. Considering the applications of those two words,
Chinese students always view it as a major, so the application is unitary; while native students
have more on the usages of the word. In terms of the same usages of “pedagogical + sth”, the
usages of that in CCIC are only three phrases — “pedagogical techniques”, “pedagogical grammar”
and “pedagogical prospective”; however, in FCIC there are six phrases of that usage. They are
“pedagogical transformation”, “pedagogical practice”, “pedagogical approach”, “pedagogical
choice”, “pedagogical guidance” and “pedagogical element”.
“Reform” is a verb which we have discussed in the previous section. In CCIC, its
frequency is 84 times and the cross-article result is 21 times; however, in FCIC, the frequency is
six times and the cross-article result is 3. These statistics indicate that domestic students use the
term more frequently and more diverse than native speakers. And considering the background of
China, that word should be included in the academic vocabulary list.
“Proficiency” is the word which means a high degree of ability or skill in something. And
the students’ proficiency is often reflected in the form of “score”. That is why these two words
should be included in the academic word list. In CCIC, the frequencies of proficiency are 16 times
and the range results are 21; however, in FCIC, the frequencies are only two times and the range
results are two too. “Score” means the result of a test or examination and it is always shown in
plural form. In CCIC, the frequency of it is three times and the range results are two; however, in
FCIC, the frequency is 13 times and range results are seven. Obviously, the distribution in FCIC
is more widely than CCIC, and the usages are more diverse too.
The next word is “self-reflection”. In CCIC, its frequency is three times and the range
results are two; in FCIC, the frequency is two times and the range results are two. The distribution
is average and the frequency is low too, but it is a way of self-assessment, which is an important
part of teaching. That’s why it should be included in the academic word list.
The last word is “score”, this word always appear in course evaluation, and the frequency
of that word between CCIC and FCIC is more average, and the cross-article result of that word
between the two is high. That is to say, the word “score” is the more common used word both in
CCIC and FCIC, and that word should be included in the academic word list of this field.
24
Corpus-Based Comparative Research in the Abstracts of Curriculum and Instruction Doctoral Dissertations by
Chinese and Foreign Students
Notes: in the “Frequency and Range” part, “C” refers to CCIC, and “F” refers to FCIC
Fig. 4.5 Special Terms of Curriculum and Instruction
4.2.4 Summary
Fig. 4.6 Comparison of Academic Words at Home and Abroad
First of all, as far as the capacity of the corpus is concerned, the domestic Curriculum and
Instruction corpus (CCIC) has a total of 49,339 words (or word tokens), and a total of 15,223
words (or word tokens) abroad. The corpus capacity of domestic Curriculum and Instruction is
about 3.24 times that of foreign Curriculum and Instruction (FCIC).
Secondly, in terms of academic vocabulary for Curriculum and Instruction at home and
abroad, there are 6,932 academic vocabularies in the domestic corpus, and 2,352 academic
vocabularies abroad. The domestic academic vocabulary is about 2.95 times that of foreign
Curriculum and Instruction corpus. There are 410 academic vocabulary word families in domestic
C&I and 315 in foreign C&I. Thus, in terms of the academic vocabulary word families, there are
more academic vocabulary word families in China than abroad. In terms of the academic
25
M. E. d Thesis of Bohai University
vocabulary coverage of this discipline at home and abroad, the domestic academic vocabulary
coverage is 14.05%, and abroad is 15.45%. The coverage of academic vocabulary abroad is
slightly higher than home, but there is not much difference in general.
Finally, in terms of the academic vocabulary whose occurrence is greater than two, i.e.,
R ≥2, there are 510 academic vocabularies with occurrence more than two abstracts in China,
accounting for 7.64% of the total academic vocabularies, while there are only 279 abroad, but
11.86% of the total. In other words, in terms of the academic vocabulary at home and abroad,
although the number of academic vocabulary in China is large, its frequency (F) is mostly limited
to one abstract. However, the distribution of academic vocabulary abroad is not only limited to the
same abstract.
In short, the academic vocabulary usage in the abstracts of domestic Curriculum and
Instruction Doctoral dissertations is that the academic vocabulary coverage is high, reaching
14.05%. However, the same academic vocabulary appears less frequently in multiple abstracts.
The use of academic vocabulary in the abstracts of Doctoral dissertations in foreign Curriculum
and Instruction is slightly higher than that in China, but the coverage is approximately equal.
Although the overall number of academic vocabularies abroad is less than that in China, the same
academic vocabularies appear more frequently in more abstracts.
4.3 The High-Frequency Vocabulary in Curriculum and Instruction
This section has three parts. Part one is the high-frequency vocabulary in domestic Curriculum
and Instruction. Part two is the high-frequency vocabulary in foreign Curriculum and Instruction.
And part three is the summary of this section.
4.3.1 The High-Frequency Vocabulary in Domestic Curriculum and Instruction
This section addresses the top 30 nouns and the top 5 verb families of domestic Curriculum and
Instruction Corpus (CCIC).
4.3.1.1 The Top 30 Nouns of Domestic Curriculum and Instruction
According to figure 4.7, the top 30 frequency nouns are: TEACHING, ENGLISH, TEACHER,
RESEARCH, LANGUAGE, CURRICULUM, STUDY, DEVELOPMENT, THEORY, STUDENT,
SCHOOL, KNOWLEDGE, EDUCATION, WORD, PART, CHAPTER, SYSTEM,
PROCESS,ACTIVITY, COLLEGE, INSTRUCTION, VOCABBULARY, MODEL, CULTURE,
EVALUATION, LEARNER, STRATEGY, PROBLEM, LINGUISTIC, and MEANING.
26
Corpus-Based Comparative Research in the Abstracts of Curriculum and Instruction Doctoral Dissertations by
Chinese and Foreign Students
Fig. 4.7 The Top 30 Nouns of CCIC
4.3.1.2 The Top 5 Verb Families of Domestic Curriculum and Instruction
Based on Fig 4.9, in CCIC, the top five verb families are “learn”, “study”, “base”, “use”, and
“reform”. Among “learn” verb family, “learn” occurs 18 times, “learned” occurs 7 times, “learning”
occurs 368 times and last “learnt” occurs 5 times. And their applications are showed as following:
1) “lean + prep.”, such as “learn” matches with “on, of, with, in, b y, for, from and to”; 2) be/have
learned; 3) “learning + sth”, for instance, “learning” matches with “model, process, material,
environment, idea, approach, mode, theory, demands, level, experience, effect, requirement,
strategy, guidance, view, objective, evaluation, style and field, etc”; what’s more, the last
application of “learning” is “sth + learning”, such as “reading, culture, cooperative, language,
English, and objective”.
The next verb family is “study” family, among them “study” occurs 230 times in CCIC,
“studied” occurs 7 times, “studies” occurs 56 times, and “studying” occurs 7 times too. And the
usages of them are showed as following: 1) “study + prep.”, such as “study” matches with “on,
about, of, for, in”; 2) “study + sth”, for instance, “study” matches with “clue, method, procedure,
background, methodology”; 3) “sth + study”, such as “empirical, experimental, world-wide,
strategy, case, constructivism, cognitive, English, future, language, linguistic, corpus, etc” together
with “study”; and the last usage is when “study” as a subject and the predicate verb patterns are
“moves, attributes, analyzes, revisits, conducts, raises, starts, argues, finds, constructs, investigates,
expounds, and puts forward”.
The third verb family of CCIC is “base”. Among them, the occurrences of “base” are 6
times and “based” are 167 times in total. The first application is “base + prep” and “be based +
prep”, such as “base” along with “for, of and to” and “be based” along with “on or upon”. The
second application is some compound words by the combination with “based”, such as “net-based,
theory-based, performance-based, activity-based, nationality-based, philosophy-based, problem-
based, corpus-based, categorized-based, knowledge-based, task-based, habit-based, rule-based,
inquiry-based, school-based, and memory-based”. What’s more, by the analysis with the
applications of “base” in CCIC, “base school” is the only one fixed matching in it.
27
M. E. d Thesis of Bohai University
The next one is “use”. Among them, “use” occurs 43 times, “used” occurs 24 times, “uses”
occurs 6 times and “using” occurs 29 times totally. And the usages of them are quite simple-- “use
+ prep” and “be used + prep”. For instance, the word “use” always together with prep like “of, to,
or in” or “be used” along with “to or in”.
The last one is “reform” and it includes “reform”, “reforming” and “reforms”. What’s
more, the occurrence of “reform” is 84, of “reforming” are 2 and of “reforms “are 4. The first
application of it is “reform + prep”, such as “reform” together with “of or in” in one sentence. And
next one is “sth + reform”, such as “learning, curriculum, education, promoting, deepening, course,
experimental, unilateral, and temporarily” along with “reform”.
Fig. 4.9 The Top 5 Verb Families in Domestic Curriculum and Instruction
4.3.2 The High-Frequency Vocabulary in Foreign Curriculum and Instruction
This section addresses the top 30 nouns and the top 5 verb families of foreign Curriculum and
Instruction Corpus (FCIC).
28
Corpus-Based Comparative Research in the Abstracts of Curriculum and Instruction Doctoral Dissertations by
Chinese and Foreign Students
4.3.2.1 The Top 30 Nouns of Foreign Curriculum and Instruction
Based on Fig. 4.8, the top 30 frequency nouns of FCIC are: STUDY, TEACHER, STUDENT,
CURRICULUM, SCHOOL, EDUCATION, LANGUAGE, PRACTICE, ANALYSIS,
PROGRAM, CLASSROOM, DATA, INSTRUCTION, RESEARCH, ENGLISH, PARTICIPANT,
POLICY, FINDING, APPROACH, ASSESSMENT, LEVEL, CASE, EXPERIENCE, RESULT,
TECHNOLOGY, IMPLEMENTATION, METHOD, DISTRICT, INTERVIEW, and STATE.
Fig. 4.8 The Top 30 Nouns of FCIC
4.3.2.2 The Top 5 Verb Families of Foreign Curriculum and Instruction
In terms of the top five verb families in FCIC, they are “study”, “use”, “learn”, “change” and
“include”. Among the “study” family, “study” occurs 167 times, “studies” occurs 31 times and
“studied” occurs only one time. Furthermore, the usages of them are same to CCIC, but not as rich
as CCIC. When “study” is a subject of sentences, FCIC often uses “case, this, present, the, and
qualitative” to connect with it. What’s more, FCIC uses “co-relational, independent, and social”
to match with “study” which is different matching from CCIC.
The next verb is “Use”. In FCIC, “use” shows 44 times, “used” shows 28 times, “using”
shows 26 times and “uses” shows only one time. The applications of them are listed as following:
1) “use/be used + prep”, such as “use” together with “of, to, as, on” or “be used” together with “to,
in, on”; 2) “adv + using”, for instance, “quantitatively, analyzed, and measured” along with “using”;
3) the fixed matching — “in use”.
“Learn” is the second verb which shows up in two corpora. Among their morphs, “learn”
shows 44 times, “learned” and “learns” only shows one time and “learning” shows 58 times in
total. The applications in FCIC are nothing but in CCIC, except for matching with verb infinitives.
“Change” is the fourth verb family in FCIC. Among them, “change” occurs 27 times,
“changes” occurs 13 times, “changing” occurs 2 times and “changed” occurs only one time. While,
29
M. E. d Thesis of Bohai University
the usages of them are listed as following: One is “change + in”, the other is “sth + change”. For
instance, the word “climate, curriculum, practising, policy, envisioning, organizational,
incremental, and fundamental” always connect with “change” in FCIC.
The last one is “include”. In FCIC, the occurrence of “include” are 9 times, of “included”
are 18 times, of “included” are 18 times, of “includes” are 3 times and of “including” are 7 times.
The usages of them are showed as following: 1) when “include” is a predicative word, it always
matches with “recommendation, investigation, and research”; 2) “sth + included”, such as “be,
analysis, study, project, suggestion, data-sources, respondent, qualitative data, quantitative data”
along with “included”.
Fig. 4.10 The Top 5 Verb Families in Foreign Curriculum and Instruction
4.3.3 Summary
The top 30 nouns in the abstracts of Curriculum and Instruction at home and abroad have a great
relationship with the topic selection. As can be seen from the Fig. 4.7 and Fig. 4.8, among the top
30 nouns in the C&I at home and abroad, there are 10 groups of the same words: “study”,
“education”, “research”, “English”, “teacher”, “language”, “curriculum”, “student”, “school” and
“instruction”. The reason for having these 10 groups of words is that these corpora are all selected
from the discipline of Curriculum and Instruction, and accounting to the section 4.1, there are same
topics related to “curriculum and pedagogy”, “teachers and students” at home and abroad. Since
most of the domestic abstracts about “TESOL” are related to “English vocabulary teaching”, the
top 30 nouns in China include words such as “word”, “vocabulary”, and “learner”, etc. In addition,
foreign abstracts account for a certain proportion of topics related to “educational technology” and
“educational polices”, but such topics are not available in China. Therefore, “technology”,
“implementation”, “district”, “policy”, and “state”, etc are only included in foreign top 30 nouns.
In terms of the top 5 verb families of Curriculum and Instruction at home and abroad,
30
Corpus-Based Comparative Research in the Abstracts of Curriculum and Instruction Doctoral Dissertations by
Chinese and Foreign Students
“learn”, “study” and “use” are the same verb families between them. Although the frequencies of
them are different, the applications of them are similar. “Base” and “reform” are the verb families
only appear in domestic top 5 verb families. The usages of “base” are “base + prep”, “sth-based”,
or “shown as a fixed matching, i.e. base school” and the usages of “reform” are “reform + prep”,
“N + reform”, or “adv + reform”. “Change” and “include” are the verb families only appear in
foreign top 5 verb families. The usages of “change” are “change + prep” or “sth + change”, and
the usages of “include” are “shown as a predictive” or “sth + included”.
31
M. E. d Thesis of Bohai University
Chapter Five Conclusion
This chapter is mainly about the implications of domestic students and teachers of Curriculum and
Instruction. Section 5.1 is about the major findings and conclusions of the study. Section 5.2 is
about the implications on the topic selection and section 5.3 is about the implications on the usage
and teaching on academic words of this discipline.
5.1 Major Findings & Conclusions
5.1.1 Major Findings
The ultimate goal of this thesis is to apply corpus research methods by comparing the abstracts of
Chinese and foreign Doctoral dissertations in Curriculum & Instruction, to find out the similarities
and differences between the two in topic selection and academic vocabulary use, so as to achieve
the significance of helping the professional academic thesis writing and thesis writing course in
this discipline.
The following findings can be drawn from the author’s self-built corpus—CIC:
1. By categorizing the topic selection of foreign dissertations, it is easy to find that foreign
dissertations on “educational technology” accounted for a large proportion from 2014 to 2017.
Therefore, it can be inferred that the research hotspot of this major abroad is in the field of
educational technology. While, there is no related research at home in the same time.
2. Domestic studies related to “TESOL” are mainly about language input teaching such
as research on reading, vocabulary and grammar. However, the main research stream of “TESOL”
abroad is language output teaching, such as oral and writing.
3. Based on the Academic Word List produced by Coxhead, the coverage of the academic
vocabulary in China is 14.05%, with 410 word families of academic words included; the coverage
of foreign academic vocabulary is 15.45%, which contains 315 academic word families.
4. This study finds 8 special terms in the abstracts of the Curriculum and Instruction field,
which are “curriculum”, “feedback”, “pedagogy”, “pedagogical”, “reform”, “proficiency”, “self-
reflection” and “score”.
5. Out of the 5 verb families with the highest frequency at home and abroad, 3 common
verb families emerge from the two sub-corpora, which are “learn”, “study” and “use”. Despite
different collocations of the words, their basic usages are similar. In addition to the 3 common verb
families, the most frequently used verbs in China are “base” and “reform”, and the most frequently
used verbs abroad are “change” and “include”.
5.1.2 Conclusions
This chapter is mainly about the research results of the three research questions: 1) What are the
differences of topic selection between the abstracts of the domestic and foreign Curriculum and
Instruction? 2) What are the differences of academic vocabulary coverage between the abstracts
of the domestic and foreign Curriculum and Instruction dissertations? 3) What are the differences
of high-frequency vocabulary between the abstracts of the domestic and foreign Curriculum and
32
Corpus-Based Comparative Research in the Abstracts of Curriculum and Instruction Doctoral Dissertations by
Chinese and Foreign Students
Instruction dissertations? The main research findings are concluded as following:
Firstly, by analyzing the titles and key words of the abstracts of Curriculum and
Instruction at home and abroad, the research results of the first research question are summarized
below. The domestic dissertation topics are mainly about the studies on “TESOL”, “language &
culture”, “teacher & student”, “teacher-student relationship”, “learning strategies”, “curriculum &
pedagogy”, “educator”, and “textbook”. Among them, the more frequent topics are “curriculum &
pedagogy”, “TESOL”, and “teacher & student”. The foreign dissertation topics are mainly about
the studies on “educational technology”, “curriculum & pedagogy”, “teachers & students”,
“TESOL”, “educational thinking”, “communication”, “culture”, “learning motivations”, “syllibi”,
“school leadership”, and “educational policy”. The similarities are that they both have the research
topics about “curriculum & pedagogy”, “TESOL”, and “teacher & student”. But there are also
some differences. For instance, the topic selected abroad are more diverse than the domestic ones,
including topics on educational technology and education policies, which are not available in
China during the year 2014-2017. In addition, although there are topics about “TESOL”, the
directions between domestic and foreign dissertations are different. Domestic dissertations focus
more on English vocabulary or the teaching of English reading yet foreign ones focus more on oral
English and the teaching of writing.
The second research question is about the academic words of Curriculum and Instruction
at home and abroad. First, the domestic corpus contains a total of 49,339 words, of which 6,932
are academic vocabulary, accounting for 14.05% of the total number of words. There are 15,223
words in foreign corpus, of which there are 2,362 academic vocabulary, accounting for 15.45% of
the total number of words. In addition, there are 530 academic vocabularies in the Chinese corpus
that repeatedly appear in more than two abstracts, accounting for 7.64% of the total number of
academic words. There are 279 academic vocabularies that have frequently appeared in more than
two abstracts abroad, accounting for 11.86% of the total number of the academic words. These
indicate that the academic vocabulary usage in the abstracts of domestic Curriculum and
Instruction Doctoral dissertations is that the academic vocabulary coverage is high, reaching
14.05%. However, the same academic vocabulary appears less frequently in multiple abstracts.
The use of academic vocabulary in the abstracts of Doctoral dissertations in foreign Curriculum
and Instruction is slightly higher than that in China, but the coverage is approximately equal.
Although the overall number of academic vocabularies abroad is less than that in China, the same
academic vocabularies appear more frequently in other abstracts. What’s more, by analyzing the
results of the Range software, it was found that some of these words are not included in the
Academic Word List of Coxhead. In fact, Coxhead did not select the corpus of C&I when she
established the AWL, so these words should be the special terms which are included to Curriculum
and Instruction. They are “curriculum”, “feedback”, “pedagogy”, “pedagogical”, “reform”,
“proficiency”, “self-reflection”, and “score(s)”.
The last research question is about the top 30 nouns and top 5 running verb families of
the abstracts of Curriculum and Instruction at home and abroad. In terms of the top 30 nouns of
Curriculum and Instruction at home and abroad, there are 10 groups of the co-existing words:
“study”, “education”, “research”, “English”, “teacher”, “language”, “curriculum”, “student”,
“school” and “instruction”. The reason for appearing these 10 groups of words is that these corpora
are selected from the discipline of Curriculum and Instruction, and according to the section 4.1,
there are same topics related to “curriculum and pedagogy”, “teachers and students” at home and
abroad. Since most of the domestic abstracts about “TESOL” are related to “English vocabulary
teaching”, the top 30 nouns in China include words like “word”, “vocabulary”, and “learner”, etc.
In addition, foreign abstracts account for a certain proportion of topics related to “educational
technology” and “educational polices”, but such topics are not available in China. Therefore,
“technology”, “implementation”, “district”, “policy”, and “state”, etc are only included in foreign
top 30 nouns. In terms of the top five verb families at home and abroad, the most used in China
are “learn”, “study”, “base”, “use”, “reform” and their variants and the most used abroad are
33
M. E. d Thesis of Bohai University
“study”, “use”, “learn”, “change”, “include” and their variants. Among them, the similarities are
the words “study”, “use”, and “learn”, but the usages and word combinations of them are different.
The specific usages of those words have been listed in the Figure 4.9 and 4.10.
5.2 Implications on Topic Selection
As it can be seen from section 4.1, by comparing the topic selection at home and abroad, it can be
inferred that the major at home and abroad have both similarities and differences in this regard.
The same research topics are “TESOL” and “Curriculum & Pedagogy” and they are also the main
topics in this major at home and abroad, which is also in line with the training program of the
discipline as a Doctor of Education. However, there are some special points in foreign topic
selection and they are also absent in the topic selection of the discipline during 2014-2017 in China.
Therefore, Chinese students or scholars should pay more attention to these foreign topic selections,
such as “educational technology” and topics about output language teaching.
5.2.1 Educational Technology
The first implication for domestic students is that the educational technology is a good research
field for them to involve. In the corpus FCIC, there are six dissertations that have addressed
explored educational technology, accounting for 12% of the total. From the titles of these articles,
it can be seen that some of them investigate educational software, some of them argue social
software applied for teaching, and some of them are about teachers in the context of computer-
assisted instruction. Although some of them are not closely related to the second foreign language
teaching, it is not difficult to infer that computer-assisted teaching is an inevitable trend in foreign
academia. And in the context of the rapid development of information technology, the application
of computers or social software in teaching process is an inevitable choice too. Although China
has gradually applied them to the teaching field, as far as domestic Doctoral dissertations in 2014
to 2017 are concerned, none of them have used corpus-based research method except for one
article. That is to say, in the domestic C&I academia, research in this domain is still a blank.
However, taking foreign research as an example, studies in this domain will inevitably become the
focus of the future research.
In fact, China has conductive conditions to research in the educational technology field.
First, in terms of technology, China has matured technology in this direction. For example, the
communication software, such as QQ and Wechat are still constantly updated and have the same
basic functions as Facebook. Therefore, as foreigners can do research on the application of
Facebook in English teaching, Chinese also have conditions to do this kind of research. Secondly,
foreign research on this direction has been carried out for many years, and there is a mature
theoretical basis for domestic researchers to refer to. Thirdly, our society needs to apply technology
to teaching. Today, computer technology has matured, and smart phones have become almost
universal. If teachers still teach in the traditional rigid way, the expected teaching effects are
difficult to be guaranteed. If computer technology is integrated into traditional teaching, such as
rich pictures and vivid background image interpretation which can stimulate students’ learning
interest and enthusiasm, it will make teaching become more interesting and easier to carry out. In
the end, a better teaching result can be achieved. Therefore, research in this direction is in line with
the needs of students and teaching needs. All in all, research on technology in China is an inevitable
choice for researchers.
There are many benefits for researchers doing research on the educational technology,
34
Corpus-Based Comparative Research in the Abstracts of Curriculum and Instruction Doctoral Dissertations by
Chinese and Foreign Students
and the biggest benefit for students in this major is as follows: Given that the research of domestic
Curriculum and Instruction majors still limited on English teaching or pedagogy, few researchers
have done research on educational technology. Therefore, choosing to do research on educational
technology in this context is an innovative point in terms of the topic selection of this major. In
addition, it can also enrich the research types in this field.
5.2.2 TESOL — Language Output Teaching
The next implication is that domestic students of Curriculum and Instruction who choose “TESOL”
as the research topic should conduct more studies in language output teaching.
In terms of TESOL, the domestic researchers of this major should pay their attention on
output language teaching, such as oral English teaching and writing. The basic function of English,
as a language, is for communication. Human-to-human communication cannot be achieved by
listening and reading alone. The expression of meaning among human beings still needs speaking
and writing. As a result, it is not realistic for researchers to do research only on language input
teaching. In a word, the study of language output teaching should be the focus of attention for
students of Curriculum and Instruction in China.
The advantages of choosing “language output teaching” as the topic of their dissertations
are: 1) making up the topic selection gap of “language output teaching” in the discipline from 2014
to 2017; 2) enriching the students’choice of “TESOL” topics; 3) the topic is difficult but innovative,
so it can stimulate students’ potential of innovation and train their logical thinking.
5.3 Implications on Thesis Writing Course
Based on the research results of the study, the importance of academic vocabulary, and the
background of traditional thesis writing course, this study argues that academic vocabulary
teaching should be included in the thesis writing courses, and it should be added as a standard to
the course assessment. There are three advantages for the thesis writing courses of curriculum and
instruction on teaching academic vocabularies.
1) Conductive to teachers’ standardized teaching on thesis writing course
Because thesis writing course usually do not have fixed teaching contents, students still
cannot feel the significance of the course and how to write a high-quality academic thesis even
after the course ends. Thus, adding academic vocabulary as the main line of C&I thesis writing
course shows that the content of teacher’s teaching is fixed. As a result, problems such as the
shortages of pertinence of lesson preparation and the unclear teaching content of teachers have
been greatly reduced. In addition, if applying corpora to thesis writing course, a large number of
application examples of one words in the corpora also provide convenience for teachers to prepare
lessons and make the example sentences given by teachers more diverse and standardized, which
means students can get more and more scientific usages of one academic word. What’s more,
teachers can use the existing corpora as a material for students to preview and review the thesis
writing course, which can stimulate students’ interests in vocabulary learning and then improve
their autonomous learning ability.
2) Facilitating the assessment of a thesis writing course
In the past, the assessment content of the thesis writing course was mostly based on
submitting a final paper, while the paper assignment methods were mostly based on teachers’
subjective judgments, and the transparency of the final grade of the course was low. Therefore,
35
M. E. d Thesis of Bohai University
this assessment method is less fair. However, the assessment of writing courses with academic
vocabulary as the main line is easier for teachers to assign points because its content is a certain
amount of academic words. As a result, the transparency and fairness of the final assessment of
the course is increased.
3) Better guaranteed technicality of students’ final dissertations
The combination of teachers’ clear course preparation contents, independent and
innovative teaching methods, a large number of examples and fair course assessments, from
teachers’teaching to students’self-exercise, will effectively ensure the teachers’effective teaching
as well as students’ conscious of using academic vocabularies to write thesis, which will more
directly improve the quality and scientific nature of the teachers’ writing course, and indirectly
improve the academic nature of students’ final dissertation.
To summarize, this research provides the most optimal items for topic selection of the
Curriculum and Instruction. Students can choose topics for thesis writing based on their own
interests and ability from the research results of the study. For instance, the topic selections of
thesis on language output teaching and educational technology are the most creative ones. In
addition, this research is of great benefit to the teaching of academic vocabulary in the dissertation
writing course of this field. Standardized teaching content, a large number of teaching and practical
examples, and fair and effective curriculum assessment will provide a strong guarantee for teachers’
standardized teaching and the academic nature of student dissertation writing. It is hoped that the
research results of this study will be beneficial to the implementation of the writing course for this
major in the future.
5.4 Limitations and Advice for Further Research
Due to the limited ability of the author, the scale of the samples is relatively small. There are only
100 abstracts in total in this corpus and the corpus only contains 64562 words. Thus, all the
research results and inferences obtained are limited to this study, which cannot be widely
representative in China, so there still remains some certain reference value for further research.
Studying Doctoral dissertations of Curriculum and Instruction through corpus-based
research method is an innovative itself, which can become a new research direction in the future.
In addition, Coxhead’s Academic Word List (2000) cannot cover some new disciplines, so the
research on academic vocabulary in these disciplines is also an important breakthrough. This will
also be the focus of further research.
36
Corpus-Based Comparative Research in the Abstracts of Curriculum and Instruction Doctoral Dissertations by
Chinese and Foreign Students
References
Anderson, J. I. (1980). The lexical difficulties of English medical discourse for Egyptian students.
English for Specific Purpose (Oregon State University) 37:4.
Barber, C. L. (1962). Some measurable characteristics of modern scientific prose. In Contributions
to English Syntax and Philology. Goteburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis: 21-43.
Cleveland, D. B. (1983). Introduction to Indexing and Abstracting. Libraries Unlimited Inc: 103.
Troyka, Lynn Quitman. (2007). Simon & Schuster Quick Access: Reference for Writers. Totonto:
Pearson Prentice Hall: 158.
Coxhead, A. J. (1998). An academic word list (English Language Institute Occasional Publication
No. 18). Wellington, New Zealand: Victoria University of Wellington.
Coxhead, A. J. (2000). A New Academic Word List. TESOL Quarterly (34): 213-238.
Coxhead, A. & P. Nation. (2001). The specialized vocabulary of English for academic purposes.
In J. Flowerdew & M. Peacock (Eds.), Research perspectives on English for academic
purposes. Cambridge: Cambridgee University Press: 252-267.
Cohen, A. D., H. Glasman, P. R. Cohen, J. Ferrara, & J. Fine. (1998). Reading English for
specialized purposes: discourse analysis and the use of student informants. In P. Carrell,
J. Devine & D. E. Eskey (Eds.), Interactive Approaches to Second Language Reading.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 152-167.
Cowan, J.R. (1974). Lexical and syntactic research for the design of EFL reading materials. TESOL
Quarterly (8): 389-400.
Hirsh, D. & Nation, P. (1992). What Vocabulary Size is Needed to Read Unsimplified Texts for
Pleasure?. Reading in a Foreign Language, (8): 689-696
Laufer, B. (1989). ‘What percentage of text-lexis is essential for comprehension?’, in Lauren, C.
and Nordman, M. (eds.) Special Language: From Humans Thinking to Thinking
Machines. Clevedon: Multilingual Matter, P. 316-323.
Laufer, B. (1992). ‘How much lexis is necessary for reading comprehension?’, in Arnaud, P. J. and
Bejoint, H. (eds.), Vocabulary and Applied Linguistics. London: Macmillan, P. 126-132.
Liang, M. C., W. Z. Li. & J. J. Xu. (2010). Using Corpora: A Practical Coursebook. Beijing:
Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. (梁茂成、李文中、許家金. 語料庫
應用教程[M]. 北京: 外語教學與研究出版社, 2010)
Martin, V. (1976). Teaching academic vocabulary to foreign graduate students. TESOL Quarterly
(10): 91-97.
Niu, G. L. (2013a). New Perspective in Research on Journal Article Abstracts. Chinese Journal of
Henan University (Social Science), (53): 150-156. (牛桂玲. 學術期刊論文摘要研究
的新視角[J]. 河南大學學報(53:5): 150-156, 2013.)
Niu, G. L. (2013b). The Construction and Application of Chinese and English Abstracts Corpus
of Chinese and Foreign Academic Papers. Beijing: Intellectual Property Publishing
House. (牛桂玲. 中外學術論文中英文摘要語料庫的創建及應用[M]. 北京:知識產
權出版社, 2013.)
Paquot, M. (2010). Academic Vocabulary in Learner Writing From Extraction to Analysis.
Continum International Publishing Group.
Stubbs, M. (1986). ‘Language development, lexical competence and nuclear vocabulary’, in
Stubbs, M. (ed.), Educational Linguistics. Oxford and New York: Blackwell: 98-115.
Swales, J.M. (1990). Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge:
Cambridge University.
Sun, Y. Z. & L. Lei. (2013). Academic Lexical Items in Economics Journal Papers. Chinese
37
M. E. d Thesis of Bohai University
Journal of Applied Linguistics (Quarterly), (36): 254-404.
Vongpumivitch, V., J. Huang. & Y. Chang. (2009). Frequency analysis of the words in the
Academic Word List (AWL) and non-AWL content words in applied linguistics research
papers. English for Special Purpose, (28): 33-41.
West, M. (1953). A General Service List of English Words. London: Longman.
Xu, Z. (2017). The Study of Abstracts of English Undergraduates’ Papers Based on the Corpus.
Chinese Journal of Luoyang Normal University, (36): 59-61. (許展. 基于語料庫的英
語專業本科畢業論文英文摘要問題研究[J]. 洛陽師范學院學報(36): 59-61, 2017.)
Xue, G., & Nation. (1984). A university word list. Language Learning and Communication, (3):
215-229.
Yang, H. (1986). A new technique for identifying scientific/technical terms and describing science
text. Literary and Linguistic Computing (1): 93-103.
上一篇：高校網絡精品課程建設研究 ——以“小學語文課程與教學論”為例
下一篇：課程與教學論（英語）專業研究生課程現狀調查及策略研究
相關標簽:
