Using corpus methods to identify subject specific uses of polysemous words in English secondary school science materials

Many education professionals in Britain believe that school pupils have difficulty accessing academic texts because of inadequate knowledge vocabulary. Previous research has suggested some high frequency words used non-specialised contexts meanings can cause problems for pupils. We take corpus techniques the study higher and apply them to a designed aged 11 14, attempting identify such automatically. use Spoken BNC2014 as reference corpus. list semi-technical ( Baker, 1988 ), many which are polysemous, having everyday related subject may not be familiar investigate how vocabulary identified distinguished from both specialised general Some supplementary qualitative analysis was needed, using collocation concordance analysis. While time-consuming, potential benefits struggling with language make this worthwhile exercise.