Extracting Level-Specific Science and Technology Vocabulary

With rapid advances in technology come rapid advances in the language of technology, or English for Science and Technology (EST). We have had success in our earlier research in devising a systematic means of extracting leveland domain-specific words from the British National Corpus. In this study, we apply a similar methodology to the Corpus of Professional English (CPE), a 20-million-word computerized database of English used by professionals in science and technology in twenty-two domains such as biology, chemistry, engineering, mathematics, medicine, and physics. This study describes the procedure for extracting multi-level EST vocabulary from the CPE by using nine statistical measures, and an examination of the top 500 most outstanding words produced by each statistical application by grade level and EST dictionary entry word coverage.