Luận văn lexical and morphological characteristics of english documents on information technology with implications in teaching esp at utehy

LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES A rating scale for finding technical words Inter-valer reliability accuracy score calculated by the number of words assigned to four levels by the rater] and b

DANG THI LOAN

LEXICAL AND MORPTIOLOGICAL CITARACTERISTICS OF ENGLISH DOCUMENTS ON INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

WITT] IMPLICATIONS IN TEACIIING ESP AT UTEITY

(Nhiing dic diém về mặt từ vựng và hình thái học của tài liệu Tiếng Anh

chuyên ngành Công Nghệ Thông Tin với sự ứng dụng trong giảng dạy Tiếng

Anh chuyên ngành tại Trường ĐIISP Kỹ thuật Hưng Yên)

M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS

Ficld: English Linguistics

Code: 60 22 15

Hanoi, 2016

DANG THI LOAN

LEXICAL AND MORPTIOLOGICAL CTTARACTERISTICS OF ENGLISH DOCUMENTS ON INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

WITIT IMPLICATIONS IN TEACTIING ESP AT UTEITY

(Những dặc điểm về mặt từ vựng và hình thái học của tài liệu Tiếng Ảnh

chuyên ngành Công Nghệ Thông Tin với sự ứng dụng trong giảng dạy Tiếng

Anh chuyên ngành tại Trường ĐIISP Kỹ thuật Hưng Yên.)

MA MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS

Ficld: English Linguistics

Code: 60 22 15

Supervisor: Tran Thi Thu Hién, MA

1lanoi, 2010

CIIAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1.4 Word types, word tokens and word families - - - 9

2.2.1 Basie terminology with definitions of morphology „10

2⁄2.2.1 Inflaetion «cteeirrereie wl

3.1.1.2 Tools for lexical analysis - - - - 15

1.2 Classification of vocabulary of the corpus of ESP texts worsen „21 12.1 First 2,000 most frequent words in GSL - - - 22

3.1.2.3, Technical vocabulary and low frequency vecabulary - 25 3.1.3 Size of Ilechmical vocabulary in [ho ESP Ioxis 26

3.2.21, SUBBX ing cuicooekereenirriraraerroeirsrrirosssu 3Ô

3.2.5 Conclusion - - - - 34 CHAPTER 4: CONCLUSIONS

REFERENCES

APPENDIX

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Abbreviations

AWL : Academic Word List

EIT : English for Information Technology

ESP English for Specific Purposcs

GE : General Linglish

GSL : General Service List

UTEHY Universily o[Teelmical Eduention, Hưng Yen

LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES

A rating scale for finding technical words

Inter-valer reliability accuracy score calculated by the number of words assigned to four levels by the rater] and by the researcher

Inter-valer reliability accuracy score calculated by the number of words assigned to four levels by the rater 2 and by the researcher

Inter-raler reliability accuracy score calculated by the muanber of words assigned to four levels by the rater 2 and by the researcher

Coverage of texts by the various levels of vocabulary tokens and types by RANGE program

‘The most frequent words in word list 1 The most fequent words in word list 2 The most, frequent, words im werd list 3 The most fequent words in werd list 4 Size and different levels of the vocabulary throughout the corpus of texts The frequency of four levels of vocabulary in the corpus

The most frequent derivational suffixes in the corpus

Itis clear that English language has become more dominant around the world English is a means of communication between people of different cultures ‘This makes Lnglish widespread On the other hand, English is the language of seicnce and technelogy and most universities and institutes in the world use it in the fields of education

In Icaming English, a good mastery of vocabulary is csscntial for Icamers Without vocabulary, it is so difficult to convey anything, Pyles and Algeo (1970) noted that “when

we first think about the ianguage, we think about words It is words that we arrange logether lo mvike sentences, conversations and discourse of all kinds” In fact, vocabulary size is important to link the four skills of speaking, listermg, reading and writing all together Clearly, for leamers with specific goals, knowledge of the technical terms

associated wilh a particular field of the study will be nee

ary, and this type af vocabulary

is an obvious focal point in any examination related to lexis of the scientific texts, Indeed, there may be a temptation to believe that a mastery of technical terms is all that is required

for success in ESP reading, in Praser (2005)

As such, vocabulary leaming and teaching is a central activity in the second language classroom, One of the potential vocabulary leaming strategies is the use of morphological knowledge to Ica vocabulary, With morphological awareness, Icamers arc able to learn complex words better by morphemes and morphemic boundaries

In the context of University of Technical Education, Hung Yen (UTEHY), general English

(GE) and English for Specific Purpose (HSP) are compulsory subjects, Students of II’ start

learning TIT al the begining of the second year Both leamers and teachers are coping with various difficulties in learning and teaching ESP, especially in technical vocabulary, inchiding the lack of field knowledge with numerous terms, complicated structures and countless exprassions, the insufliciency of teaching aids and refercnec material Meanwhile the teachers of ESP course need lo have a thorough understanding of the nature and the role of diffrent categories of words such as technical words, semi-technical words,

characteristics of English documents on Information Technology with unplications

teaching ESP at UTEHY Hopetully, the thesis would bring concrete benefits to researchers, teachers, and students of I

1.2 Aims of the study

The inter-related aims of this thesis arc:

1 to find out ths lexical and morphological features of IT English texts, and

2 to draw implications in teaching ESP at UTEHY

1.4, Methods of the study

‘The study presents a theoretical background based on a number of materials on lexicology and morphology Next, to achieve the aims mentioned above, quantitative and qualitative incthods appropriate lo the corpus af linguistics ars used with the support of some tools, which are RANGE program (Nation, 2005), Simple Concordance Program (Reed, 1997- 2008), and especially, Chung and Nation’s (2003) four-point rating scale All of them are presented in deiail in chapler 3

lexical and morphological characteristics, becanse lexical and morphological features of ESP can be analyzed under the same method with the same group of analysis tools

However, the researcher focuses mainly on lexical features, and only general morphological characteristics of the corpus such as inflection and affixation:

1.6 Organization of the study

The thesis consists of four chapters, references and appendices

Chapter 1: Intreduction

Thus chapter presents rationale, scope, and objectives of the study Research methods, research questions and organization of the thesis are also given clearly in this chapter

Chapter 2: — Literature Review

This chapler provides fundamental and thgorelical coneepls relaled lo the purpose of the study It deals with theories of lexicon and morphology

Chapter 3: Lexical and morphological characteristics of English documents on

Information technology at UTEIY

This chapter not only investigates lexical items but alse presents morphological features of FIT documents used al UTEHY Main features

of lexical and general morphological characteristics are also indicated in this chapter

Chapter 4: Conclusions

This final chapter gives the overall answers for the research questions of the study, implications for teaching and leaming of ESP, especially EIT, and some suggestions for furthor studios

words in a language (Jackson & Amvela, 2002:11), In Richards et al (1992:212), lexicon is defined as “a set of all the words and idiom of any language

the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions, More formally, it is @ language's

inventory of lexemes

2.1.1 Wards anil lexemes

When linguists study the lexicon, one of the things they study is what words are In fact, this term appears to be a simple concept, but it is extremely difficult to have the best definition of the word, which can satisfy all linguists There are different definitions of

words trom various authors

In Cruse, D.A (1986: 35), word is defined as “the smailest element of a sentence which

has the positional mobility” and “they are typically the largest units which resist

intermption by the insertion of new material between their constituent parts.”

According to Jackson and Amvela (2002: 49), words are listed in dictionaries, they are

separated in writing by spaces and in speech by pauses They consider the word as

uninterruptible unit of structure consisting of one or more morphemes and which

typically occurs in the structure of phrases

Four main characteristics of words are also prosomicd in Biber ot al (1999:51)

‘The lexicon includes the lexemes used to actualize words Lexemes are formed according

to morpho-syntactic rules and express sememes In this sense, a lexicon organizes the mental vocabulary in a speaker's mund: First, 1t organizes the vocabulary of a language according to certain principles (for instance, all verbs of motion may be linked in a lexical

Cruse, DA (1986: 76), characterized # lexeme as “a farnily of lexieal units”, The term Jexeme” was proposed by Lyons (1977-18-25) to avoid complexities associated with the vague word “word”, Lel us consider thase forms: go’ going/ wenl/ gone, Tour forms have four different meanings but they have a shure lexical meaning and different grammalically meanings Tn ofhcr words, they sll share a core mearing although they arc spelled end

Pronounced differenity We say that, these four forms constitute ane lexeme “go” Biber et

at, (1999:54) defined lexcme as “a group of ward forms [hal share Ihe sane besic meaning and belong to the same the word class” A lexeme may be abstract, but iL can be simptified

by saying a loxeme allows different inflections to affix to it to make words For example,

go is a lexcine, meanwhile gocs and going arc inflected forms of go The dictionary information on a texeme as 4 dictionary entry gencrally inchides its pronunciation, part of spevch, inflected forms and various meanings, generally grouped according to its senses

and sub-senses

2.1.2 Ward classification

Word-classification has been dealt with in different ways by different linguists Part of speech, the name employed to classify words, include nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions, and interjections (oh, shh, Ouch) ‘his classification

of the words belongs to traditional grammar and the classification of the words of a language in this way depends on their grammatical fictions For example, nouns can occur in certain places and have some special functions, Nouns can be the head of noun

phrases functioning as a clause constituent, subject, object or complement or it can

combine with a preposition preceded to form a prepositional phrase which can function as subject complement and adverbial in a sentence as well as post — modifier in a noun phrase and complementation of an adjective and a verb So, word - class membership is an important lexical feature However, if we just look at a word, it is sometimes difficult to know how to classify it For example, the word “book” may be a verb in “book seats for

Lyons (1968; 66) used the lor “word-forn” in word classification and classified the words into: full aud emply word-forms Full word-forms are forms of the major paris of speech such as nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs, TEmply word-forms hetong to a wids varicty of classes such »s propositions, articles, canjunctions, and cerlam pronouns and

adverbs, Other lerms found in literate, more or less equivalent to “empty word — form™ are “form word”; “functional word”, “gramunatical word” and “struchure word” Lyons also mentioned thal in-many modern schools of grammatical Ihory, the terms “open and closed

classes” used lo classify the words correlates with his terms “full and emply word — forms”, respectively

Biber et al (1999) and Celee Murcia and Larsen Freemen (1983) also divided words

into open classes and closed system

In conchision, two classes of words: the open classes or full word forms and the close system or empty word forms have been discussed, The closed classes contain the so-called

“grammatical” or “function” words, which generally serve the grammatical construction of

sentences ‘hey are articles, demonstratives pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions and

interjections The open classes are “content” words, which consist of nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs, carrying the main meaning of a sentence

2.1.3 Ward meaning

Meaning of a language has been studied at different levels (trom the morpheme to the discourse) Hence, many linguists have held a discussion of the meaning of “meaning”, the theories of meaning, and its kinds, Word meanmg is divided into two types: grammatical meaning and lexical meaning, which will be dealt with as follows:

meanings) buf differ in rospsel of their grammatical mncaning” Obviously, a momsingful

sentence is composed of smaller meaningfit parts, and the smaller parts are namely

s or words which are in different forms causing different meanings of the senlence

Lobner (2002: 12-13) also mentioned that the grammatical form of a word, 2.g., singular,

plural, positive, comparative, sumple past tense, progressive past tense, etc has a meanmg

Such meanings are called grammatical meaning,

In conclusion, grammatical meaning of the words is meaning in terms of grammar and their grammatical meaning arty functions in conlexis whereas their lexical meaning can stand on its own ‘thus, the word “dog” has meaning to an Linglish speaker, even out of contexts, whereas “the” does not ‘Ihe lexical meaning and the grammatical meaning of the word together form the meaning of the sentence

2.1.3.2, Lexical meaning

Ferdinand de Saussure in Jackson & Amwela (2002:55) considered word meaning as a linguistic sign a mental unit consisting of two faces: a concept and an acoustic image He thinks that the discussion of word meaning focuses on the relationship between the two faces of the sign, via the acoustic mage or “sigmficant”, i.e the signifier, on the one hand,

and the concept of “signifig”, i the thing meant, on the other, And he narrows down his discussion to an examination of some of the most common terms associated with the word meaning such as: denotation, connotation, reference and sense

According to Baker (1988:12), the lexical meaning of a word or lexical unit may be thought of as the specific value it has in a particular linguistic system In other words, the lexical meaning is “the most outstanding individual property of the word” It can

stand on its own.

We are likely to think that a language consists of a large number of words and cach of

these words has a dircel correlation with something outsids language, which is its moaning

‘Thus, denotation is the linguistics term used to refer to the relation holding between a word (a lexeme) and a whole class of extra-linguistic objects Lyons (1977:207) defined the denotation of a Texeme as the relationship that holds belwecn that lexeme and persons, things, places, properties, processes and activities external to the language system, In other words, denotational (referential) meaning is the meaning of expression (a word), which it rofers lo or denotes or stands for For example, the word “doolor” refers lo the person wha works in the hospital and helps other people to recover from discases

Jackson & Amwzla (2002:57) stated that denotation refers to the relationship belwcen a linguistic sign and its denotatum or referent

b Connataiion

Crystal, D, (2003) stated that a group of synonyms cannot be distinguished by definition in terms of their denotation, bul they usually display noticeable differences of connotation, as

in the case of car, automobile, run about, buggy, banger, bus, hot rod, jalopy, old crock,

racer, and so on According to Jackson & Amwvela (2002:57), connotation constitutes

additional of lexcines, ¢.g poctic, slang, haby language, biblical, casuat, colloquial, fortval,

humorous, lepal, literary and rhetorical Lebner (2002:35) also considered connotation the secondary meaning in addition to the primary lexical meaning Connotation is, in fact, largely dependent on the context of sage of the ward Lol us consider Ihe words Tike “pass away”, “die”, These words have the same descriphve meaning or denotative meaning but the later is neutral and used in many situations whereas the former is used in formal situation to convey the speaker’s regret someone’s death So one part of the connotation of

a lexeme is Ít expressive meaning (cmotive, attitudinal or affective meaning), which conveys the speakers’ evaluation, attitudes and feeling, Another part of connotation is the

and connotation arz both important in order to delermine word meaning in a given context 2.1.4 Word types, word tokens and word families

Let us take a look at this example:

Mary goes to Paris next week, and she trends going to Edinburgh next month

The sentence has fourteen words placed a space between each word, but two of them (the words to and next) arc repeated Se there arc only twelve different words in the sentence According to Carstars-McCarthy (2002:5), there are 14 tokens and 12 types in the sentence One may say two performances of the same tune, two copies of the same book, are distinet token of one type

‘The type-token distinction is relevant to the notion “word” in this way Sentences (spoken

or writlen) may be said to be composed of word-lokens, but il is clearly nol word-tokons that are listed in dichonaries Words are listed in dictionaries entries are, at one level, types, not tokens

Another term relative to the study is “word families” Words are grouped into families on

the basic of their morphology, both their inflections and their derivations (Bauer and Nation, 1993) A family consists of a base form, iis possible inflectional forms and the words derived from it by prefixation and suftixaton According to Bauer and Nation (1993), the idea of a word family is important for a systematic approach to vocabulary teaching and for deciding the vocabulary load of texts A word family includes a collection

of formally rclated and scmantically related word types 8o, the agree family could include

agree, agrees, agreed, agreeing, agreement, disagree, disagreement.

2.2 Am overview of morphology

2.2.1 Basic terminology with definitions of morphology

Morphology refers to the study of forms Linguistics morphology refers to the study of words, their internal structure and the mental process that are involved in word formation (AmofF & ludeman, 2005, O'Grady & Cuzman, 1997) It is ' the study of the hicrarchical and relational aspcets of words and the operation on lexical items according to word formation rules to produce other lexical items’ (Leong and Parkinson, 1995, p 237) Bauer (1983:13) defined that “morphology as a sub-branch of linguistics deals with the

internal structure of word-forms”,

The basic units in morphology are morphemes Morpheme is the smallest meaningfid unil

of language {any part of a word that cannot be broken down futher into smaller meaningful parts, including the whole word itself) For example, the word ‘items’ can be broken down into two meaninghil parts: iom' and the plural sulfix '-s", neither of th

“-s', are always bound)

A root is a form which is not further analyzable, cither in terms of dorivational or inflectional morphology A base form is any form to which affixes of any kind ean be

added This means that a derivationally analyzable form to which derivational affix:

are added can only be only referred to as a base, and the word part éenuhable can become an analyzable base A stem is involved only when dealing with inflectional morphology In this way, zamtorechable booomes a siom, (Bauor, 1983:20)

The analysis of words into morphemes begins with the isolation of morphs A morph is a physical form representing some morpheme in a language (Katamba and Stonham

(1993:24) A morph can be defined as a segment of a word form which represents a particular morpherne, Bauor (1983:1 5)

If different morphs represent the same morpheme, they are grouped together and they are called allomorphs of that, morpheme, Kalamba and Stontam (1993-26) According 1a Bauer (1983:15), an allomomph is a phonetically, lexically or grammatically conditioned member of a set of morphs representing a particular morpheme For example, the plural

morpheme “8”, in its regular forms, has three different phonological realizations: fiv/, and /2/ depending on the phonetic environment in which the morpheme occurs, ie it is phonetically conditioned

2.2.2 Inflection and derivation

As we know, morphemes can be divided inta two major functional categories: derivalional morphemes and inflectional morphemes This reflects arecognition of two principal word- building (morphological) processes: inflection and derivation

2.2.2.1 Inflei

According to Kalamba and Sienham (1993:223), inflectional morphology is concomed with syntactically driven word-formation, Inflectional morphology deals with syntactically determined affixation processes, They also state that inflectional morphemes do not change

referential or cognilive meaning, and do not alter the word-cl of the base 1o which iL is

attached as well Inflectional morphemes are only able to modify the form of a word so that it can fit into a particular syntactic slot For example, “book” and “books” are both noums referring to the same kind of entity The “is” ending merely caries information about the number of those entities

The following inflectional suffixes are frequently used ones in Fnglish

8 N plural book-s

-ed Vv past tense walked

-ing ụ progressive (incomplete action) walk-ing

-er Adj comparalive degree taller

-est Adj superlative degree tall-est

(adapted trom Katamba and Stonham, 1993:53) Other forms of inflcetion such as the following are nol frequently used:

Internal change in plurals and tenses (intemal vowel change) manimen: grow/grew

Suppletion in adjectives and tenses good/better; go/wert

Zero inflection in plurals or tenses deer/deer: putiput

(adapted from Bamard, 2005:530)

English has no inflectional prefixes, but some other languages have both inflectional prefixes and suifixes

2.2.2.2, Derivation

used Lo ereale new lexical items by cilher

Derivalional morphology is

+ modifying significantly the meaning of the base

- to which they are attached, without necessarily changing its grammatical category, for example, “kind” and “wrkind”

- they bring about a ship in the grammatical class of a base as well as a possible change in meaning, for example, “hard” (Adj) and “hardship” (N (abs))

- or they may cause a ship in the grammatical subclass of a word without moving it into a new word-class (as in the case of friend (N (cone)) and friendship (N (abs))

(adapted from Katamba and Stonham (1993:49-51))

Meanwhile there are only inflectional suffixes, derivational morphemes are either prefixes

or sultixes

Lig: Prefixes: ex-president, reread unknown

Suffixes: ciulđhood, centralize, greenish, derivation

Words can be tilt up by using a number of prefixes and suffixes for the same stem, and

may become very complex

E.g.: pre-indusir-tal indusiry-ial-ise, industry-ial-is-ation

2.2.3, Compounding and blending

2.2.3.1 Compounding

Compounding is anothcr word-building provess According to Biber cl al (1999:58), in compounding, independently existing bases are combined to form new lexemes Carstairs

— McCarthy (2002:59) also had the similar idea that compounds are words formed by

combining roots These following arc compound classes:

Compound verbs

Verb-verb (VV): stir-fry, freeze-chy

Noun-verb (NV): kandswash, di-condiuon

Adjective-verb (AV): dry-clean, whitewash

Preposition-verb (PV): siderestimate, outrun

Compound adjectives

Nour-adjective (NA): sky-high, ail-rich

Adjective-adiective (AA): grey-green, red-hot

Preposition-adjcetive (PA): underfidl, overactive

Compound nouns

Verb-noun (VN): swearvord, playtime

Noun-noun (XN): mosqutto net butierfly net

Adjective-noun (AN): blackboard, greenstone

Preposition-noun (PN): in-group, outpost

(adapted fromm Carstairs — MeCarthy (2002:60-62))

2.1.3.2 Hlending

‘As we see in compounding, the whole of each component root is reproduced However, we encounter a kind of compound where at least one component is reproduced only partially These are known as blends (Carslairs - McCarthy (2002:65), Blending is a process which collapses two words into one

For cxamplc: compuscrvc (fusing computer and serve)

computron (ising computer and electron)

CHAPTER 3: LEXICAL AND MORPHOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF EIT

To carry out the lexical and morphological analysis of the material, 10 texts of the book must be changed into the corpus of 10 text files because of the requirement of the methods and the tools that the researcher will use It is necessary to give a detailed description of these methods and tools before the analysis is performed,

3.1.1.1 Methods for lexical analysis

‘The lexical analysis of Enghsh of Information Technology followed the basic steps of ESP analysis Firstly, a quantitative method appropriate to the corpus of linguistics was used

with the support of RANGE and FREQUENCY program The program produced

classification of words based on Ibree word lisis available in iL, the levels of word lypes, word lokens and word families of the corpus of texts, Depending on the classification of words made by the program, the researcher reclassified the vocabulary into four new levels based on the Chung and Nation’s (2003) four-point rating scale which will be described in more detailed in the next section, However, this technique was complemented by an equally important qualitative method

3.1.1.2 Toals for lexical analysis

‘To carry out the lexical analysis, first, RANGE program which is available at http://www vuw ae.nz/lals/stafi/Paul_Nation was used to find the coverage of the texts by certain word lists, create word lists based on frequeney and range, and to discover shared

and unique vocabulary in several pieces of writing (Nation P (2005) Itis the program for Windows based PCs made by Nation, P to provide the statistics of word types, word tokens, word familics, frequency of occwrenecs and range of occurrences te ect an overall statistie description of the corpus of texts The 2,000 most frequent words fiom GSL, Academic Word list and the list of words which are not in the above lists or technical words are made by RANGL Llowever, to have in-depth description of lexical characteristics of ESP, it is necessary to apply the Chung and Nation’s (2003) four-point rating scale to get four new lavels af vocabulary

Chung and Nation (2004) proved four-point rating scale technique has a higher degree of reliability than the others in identifying technical vocabulary A rating scale approach to identifying terms involves deciding whether the individual meanings of words fall into the sphere of specialised meaning or not Deciding on or interpreting the individual meanings

of words depends on the ability of the rescarchers to draw on their own domain knowledge and to make inferences from domain information within the context in question (Asher and Lascarides, (1996), Becka (1972), Stambuk (1998) in Chung and Nation (2004)) At the decision stage, researchers ultimately have to rely on their intuition and knowledge of the Geld ‘This approach was used with the support of RANGL program, some specialised dictionaries, and discussions with specialised experts,

With the application of the four-point rating scale in classification of four levels of vocabulary, words were classified as being technical or non-technical words by rating them

on a four point scale designed to measure the strength of the relationship of a word to a particular specialised field, Chung and Nation (2003) Items classified at steps 3 and 4 in

Table 1 were considered to be technical words Items at steps 1 and 2 were not

Level 1 (the first 2,000 most frequent words) Words such as fimetion words that have a meaning that has ne particular relationsiup with the field of information technolopy, that is, words independent

of the subject matter Examples are: the, is, between, it, your, which, by, commen,

connonly, directly constantly, early, and especially

Level 2 (Academic Word List)

Words that have a meaning that is minimally related to the field of information

technology ixamples ars: incidence, detect, available, distributed

Level 3 (Technical words)

Words that have a meaning that is closely related to the field of information

technology They refer to parts, structures, operations or functions of the

computers Such words are also used in general language The words may have some restrictions of usage depending on the subject field Examples are: access, scan, infected, technology, erystal, voltage Words in this category may be

technical terms in a specific ficld like information technology and yet may occur with the same meaning in other fields and not be technical terms in those fields

Level 4 (Law frequency words)

Words that have a meaning specific to the field of mformation technology and are not likely to he known in general language ‘hese words have clear restrictions of

usage depending on the subject ficld, Examples arc: microchips, mainframe,

deskiop, palmtop, drivers, Gridpad, pexel, antivirus

Table 1: A rating scale for finding technical words (adapted from Chung

and Nation (2003)

Words at Level 3 may have polysemes that occur in general use with little change in

Tncaring, for example mouse and button Lin

1 4 includes words thal oven though they ars used outside information technology, they could be thought of as being information technology terms Examples are sofiware and database

To enswe the rating scale is used reliably, an inter-rater reliability check is cared out Inter-rater reliability check is used to estimate whether there is a reasonable degree of agreement by different raters as to where a lexical item falls on the scale ‘l'o make sure

that the inter-rater reliability check works efficiently, the training of raicrs should be donc

using the same kinds of materials that are used for the research ‘The way it was applied in this siudy will be presented later in the following section

3.1.1.3, Inter-rater reliability check

According to Chung and Nation (2003), to make sure that the scale could be apphed consistently in the research, an inter-rater reliability check was carried out, The researcher invited two raters who are native speakers of inglish and are working at our school to

participate in the chock The raters’ task was to assess the degree of specificity of the

meaning of the words in the text to the field of information technology

The first step of the check was the training of the invited raters, The researcher explained the objectives of the study, the aim of the reliability check and how to consider the semantic relationship in order to place the words in the four-point scale, The raters were then provided with the text in which the words to be rated were already marked, Forty words (len from cach of the four steps as classified by the tescareher) wore randomly chosen to be used The researcher and the rater went through the words one by one together Lach time the raters” results were compared with those of the researcher When discrepancics were found, they were discussed by the rescareher and the raters and all

were resolved

‘Then, sixty words were randomly selected from two parts of two texts, fifteen for each of the four steps, were provided for the ralers to analyze independently All these terms arc numbered (1), (2), (3) and (4) according to the four levels of vocabulary respectively by

the researcher [owever, some words appear in either Level 1 or 2, according to RANGE

program may go izle Level 3, so thal these words are wacked with (1 +3) for those moving

from Level 1 to Level 3 and (2-3) for those moving from Level 2 to Level 3

Levels of vovabulary chosen by the re

keyboard with a diguid(1) crystal display (LCD) screen(1—3) and an cleetronic stytes(4)

Users input data by printing(1—3) individual(2) letters(1) directly on the screen

There are two technologies at work in a clipboard PC: one allows raw data(2—3) to get into the compuler and the other allows the computer to gure onl what that data means,

‘The first technology refies(2) principally(2) on hardware(4) and varies(2) depending on

the particular computer In one system, marketed under the name GRIDPad(4), the

computer's LCD(4) screen is covered by a sheetl) of glass with a transparent (3) conductive coating Voltage is sent across the glass in horizontal(3) and vertica/(3) lines

forming a fine grid(4), al any point on the grid, the vofzage(3) is slightly different When

the stylus - which is essentially(|) a volgneter(3) - touches the screen, il informs the

computer of the voltage at that point The computer uses this information to determine where

the stylus is and causes a liquid so crystal(3) péxel(4) to appear at those coordinates(2)

The position of the stylus is monitored(2 13) several hundred times a second, so as the

stylus moves across the glass, whole strings of pixels are activated

service people, pirated games, putting floppies(4) in publicly available(2) PCs without

wrile-prolect tabs(4), commercial sofeware(A) (rarcly), and software distributed() over

computer bulletin() board systems (also quite rare/y(1), despite(2) media(2)

misinformation) Many viruses have spread through pirated — dlegally(2) copicd or broken

- games This is ezsy(1) to awoi4(l) Pay for your games, fair and square

Tf yon use a shared PC or a PC thal vas public access(2>3), such as one ima college PC lab or a ibrary(1), be very careful about putting floppies into that PC's drives(1>3)

withoul a wrile-prolecl tab Carry a virus-checking program and sean(3) the PC before

letting it write data onto loppies

Despite the low imecidence(2) of actual viruses, it can't hurt to min a virus checking

program now and then There are actuafly(1) two kinds of antivirust4) programs: virus

shields, which(T) detect(2) viruses as they ars

fscting your{1) PC, and virus scannersi4), which detect viruses once they've infected you

Finally, the reliability accuracy score was used to estimate the degree of agreement

* Roscrillal (1987: 67) states thal a Taw

Levels chosen by the|| Levels chosen by the}|‘latal wards assigned

rater 1 researcher by three rater 1

Table 2: Inter-rater reliability accuracy score calculated by the munber of

words assigned to four levels hy the rater I and hy the researcher (adapted

from Chang aad Nation (2003)

In table above, we can see that the rater agreed on the assignment of all 15 of these items at Levels 1, 2 and 3 TL rneans that the rater agreed with the researcher on all the worlds that the researcher had moved fiom Level 1 or 2 to Level 3 However, 4 of 15 words from Level 1 were moved to Level 3 by the rater Thus, the total agreement score is (15 15115 115) 56 oul of 60 Since a raw accuracy score of 0.7 is acceplable, the result af 0.933 of the check is very reliable

Table 3: Inter-rater reliability accuracy score calculated by the munber of

words assigned to four levels hy the rater 2 and hy the researcher (adapted

from Chang avid Nation (2003)

The table shows that the rater 2 agreed on the assignment of all 15 of these 1tems at Levels

1 and 3 Iowever, the rater’s agreement was just 13 items out of 15 at Level 2, and 12 items out of 15 at Level 4 Although results from the rater is quite different from the

researcher’s, this result of 0.916 accuracy is much higher than acceptable result (0,7)

Resulls of the

show that if is rehable for the re:

cher to use the four-point mating

seale consistently through the research,

3.1.2 Classification of vocabulary of the corpus of ESP texts

The corpus of texts was run through the RANGE program with three base word lists available in the program The first 1,000 most frequent words, the second 1,000 most frequent words, and the Academic Word List are the word list 1, 2 and 3 respectively The first and second 1,000 mos! frequent words make up the Level of the first 2,000 most frequent words or the General Service Last (GSL) Especially, words not in three above

lists are technical vocabulary and low frequency vocabulary (Chung and Nation, 2003:104)

Word types, word tokens, and word families are the units of counting of the four word lists, However, word family is only reference data, not a significant unit because one or two members of a family are lechnical words, not all of thơm ars (e.g., frequency and frequent), For the reason, no figure regarding word family for Werd List 4 has no effeot on this study,

frequent words from GSL)

3 (Academic Word List - | 556/9.08 242/14.70 174

3.12.1 First 2,000 most frequent words in GSL

The first 2,000 most frequent words in GSL are those from word list 1 and word list 2 of

the table 4 As we see, the word tokens in the word list 1, the first 1,006 most frequent

words in GSI, are 1516, comprise 73.78% of the total number of tokens, but with only

50.43% word types of the total word types in the whole corpus It means that there is an extremely high frequency of occurrences for word types in the word list 1 Moreover, the

largest amount of both word tokens and word types in the word list 1 shows that this word class has the highest density in all the corpus, wilh over a hall af all

‘The following table describes the most fequent types in word list 1, in which the first column is the types, the cond tells cach ikem occurs in how many texts, the third shows how many tmes that item occurs throughout the corpus and the rest of columns indicate in

which text it occurs and its frequency in that text

‘There are 15 wards types ftom ward list 1 appearing in all 10 texts ‘They ars te, to, and,

of a, in, is, that, ave, for, it, s, they, by, can, andl the frequency of these words throughout the corpus is 351, 186, 182, 171, 158, 129, 87, 76, 66, 59, 56, 50, 32, 31 and 29 respectively The word type “the” has the highest frequency of occurrence (351) and the highest range, the nexl is “40” with 186 limes of appearance However, “lo” plays the role

of not only preposition but also as a particle, as “io” in “fo carry” Similaily, “if” word type with the frequency of 56 functions as a pronoun or an acronym of “information and iselmolagy”

Jn the contrast, the tokens from the second 1,000 most frequent words in GSL comprise only 4,98% with 305 itcms oul of ths whole corpus and [he word types from this word Tist

is 162 (9.84%), the smallest category of all in the corpus The highest range in this word list is 5, which means that no words occur more than in S texts, ‘The frequency of occurence of these words is much smaller than those in word list 1 Table 6 shows thal

“program” has the highest frequeney score 30 and the next is “programs” with the frequency of 10, The rest of words appear no more than 10 times in the whole corpus, It is

clear that there is a larger lexical variation in word list 2 than in word list |

Table 6: The most frequent words in word list 2

In conclusion, the first 2,000 most frequent words in GSL make up 78.76% of the total number of tokens and 60.27% of the word types of the corpus This figure is equivalent with the statistics “around 80% of the running words of academic text” presemted by Nation (2001), but much highcr than 20.3% of the anatomy text, and 41.8% of the applied

linguistics text in Chung and Nation’s research (2003:108)-This means that students at UTEHY may not have many difficulties in dealing with th

pociatized texts 3.1.2.2, Academic word list

The word tokens of Academic Word List from word list 3 is 9.08%, meanwhile the word types is 14.7% out of the total number of word types in the corpus It is quite higher than

the figure Chung and Nation (2003:104) presented “the vocabulary from Academic Word

List covers on average 8.5% of academic text”

Table 7: The mast frequent words in word list 3

‘Table 7 indicates the range and frequency of some typical words found in the corpus of lexts, “Computer” worl has the highest frequency of 68 and appears in 9 oul of 10 texis, and the next item is “computers” word with the frequency of 24 and the range of 8

3.1.2.3 Technical vocabulary and lw frequency vocabulary

Both technical vocabulary and low frequency vocabulary are from word list 4, the list of

words that arz nol in three above lists (Chung and Nation, 2003: 104) Table 4 shows that

the number of tokens fom this word list comprise 12,15% of the total of the corpus, which

is a bit higher than the number of 10% that Nation (2001) suggested However, the word

types are quite large, with 25.03% out of the whole of the corpus This means that there is

the largest lexical variation in word list 4

Table 8: The most frequent words in word list 4

Table 8 indicates “sofware” word has the largest frequency of occurrence in this word list (32) and appears in high range of texts (8) Nevertheless, most of the words in this word list have low frequency and low range and the detailed classification of tecimical

vocabulary and low frequeney vocabulary will be presenled in the nox! step of analysis

3.1.3 Size of technical vocabulary in the ESP texts

Technical vocabulary size refers to the number of words of which some aspect of meaning

is related to a specialized area In theory, three classes of vocabulary: the first 2,000 most frequent words in GST; Acadsinic Word List, and Technical vocabulary and low frequency vocabulary list were defined by RANGE program However, practically, technical words at level 3 can come from the high frequeney words or the Academic Word List (Chung and Nation, 2003), To gain the slalistics of the size of technical vocabulary im

‘the corpus, it is necessary to reclassify words into four new levels of vocabulary, which are Level 1 - the first 2.000 most frequent words, Level 2 - Academic Word List, Level 3 -

‘Technical words, and Level 4 - low frequeney words 'Pherefore, the four-point rating scale

is consistently applied to the data analysis in this study with the assistance of RANGE

Program afler the inter-rater reliability check lms been performed

In the process of assigning words to different levels, word types rather than word families, are used as the imil of counting because a word type is a single word form; meanwhile, not all of members of a family are techmoal words (Chung and Nation, 2003)

Level 2 ( Academic Word List) 193 (11.2%)

Tevel 3 (Techiieal words) 384 (23.3%)

Level 4 (Low frequency words) 116 (7.1%)

Total types 1646 (100%)

Table 9: Size and different levels of the vocabulary Usroughaul the corpus of texts

Table 9 shows the results of rectassification of words in the whole corpus by using the

four-point rafting scale It can be seen that there is a change in the number of types of each

level compared with the result from RANGE program (table 4) 39 types (2.37%) from

Tevel 1 and 49 (3.0%) items fron level 2 are moved fo level 3 (lechnical words) The first

2,000 most frequent words in GSL still comprise over a hatt of the word types in the

corpus, which is the largest proportion of the corpus (57.9%) ‘The second largest one is tevel 3 (lechnicat words) with 23.3%, and the strallest type is level 4 with 7.1% The Lotal

proportion of technical vocabulary and low frequency vocabulary is 30.4% of the total of

the corpus, which is higher than the statistics of 10% as Nation (2001) suggested Towever, it is still smaller than the percentage of 36.7% for technical vocabulary of

miedico-pharmaccutical texts found by Van Hanh, N.T, and only nearly haft of 70.1% for

technical vocabulary of an anatomy text found by Chung and Nation (2003) It means that