The Veterinary Medicine Academic Word List

In order to cater to the needs of learners in veterinary medicine (VM) and for field-specific academic literacy, the Veterinary Medicine Academic Word List (VMAWL) was created. The VMAWL is a specified list of academic words used in published research articles (RAs) in VM and was created using the Veterinary Medicine Corpus. The list was compiled using LancsBox 6.0, prompted to yield a list of PoS-tagged lemmas (P-lemmas) sorted by frequency and dispersion. The most frequent 1,000 lemmas for each content word category were collated into a candidate list. We then manually eliminated proper nouns and General Service List words.

The VMAWL contains 835 PoS-tagged lemmas (P-lemmas), a reiteration of which was produced by adding the types in Bauer and Nation’s (1993) taxonomy at the second level to test coverage. The VMAWL was profiled and validated against the four parent categories independently on AntWordProfiler (Anthony, 2022a) with analysis showing the VMAWL comprises 13.75 % of the VMC and diverges greatly from generic word lists like the AWL, NGSL, new-GSL, and AVL. The list can be used to develop teaching materials for EAP or ESP academic writing courses.