‘Cultivating the Language’: Investigating horticultural lexis

Abstract

Research into the delivery of English language courses at the tertiary level has highlighted the need for focused, contextualised language instruction (Hyland, 2006, 2013; Bruce, 2016), while other studies have emphasised the need for subject-specific academic word lists (Sutarsyah, Nation, & Kennedy, 1994; Coxhead, 2018). An example from Agriculture is the work by Martinez, Beck & Panza (2009). Horticulture, given its significance to the New Zealand economy, is a ripe field for corpus-based investigations of language to support learners in this field. This study is based on first year horticultural courses at two New Zealand universities and investigates lexis using a written corpus. Written texts tend to have a higher specialized vocabulary load than spoken classroom texts (Coxhead & Demecheleer, under review) and technical vocabulary can make up between 20-30% of a written text (see Chung & Nation, 2004). Preliminary results suggest that learners need a substantial vocabulary size to deal with these Horticulture texts. Coxhead's (2000) AWL covered 7.70%, in contrast to 10% reported in her academic corpus of arts, commerce, science and law. The Science list (Coxhead & Hirsh, 2007) covered 4.03%, which is consistent with their earlier findings. Further analysis of the technical vocabulary in this text will be presented in this talk, with examples, along with implications for teaching and materials design. While this study has focused on horticulture, this process can be applied to other courses that seek to develop discipline-specific corpora.