A Corpus-Based Study of Technical Vocabulary and Multi-Word Units in Nuclear English

Knowledge and acquisition of technical vocabulary is crucial for students studying in the area of nuclear science and technology as well as people working in the nuclear industry. However, not much research has been conducted in the field of nuclear energy English. Over the past few decades, corpus linguistics has added new dimensions to the field of ESP studies, and corpus analysis techniques have been widely employed in the production of academic word lists for many disciplines. This study aims to extract specialized technical vocabulary in terms of keyword analysis from the analysis of a nuclear energy textbook, using various corpus analysis techniques. And then the nuclear vocabulary list will also be compared with the New General Word List (NGWL) and the Academic Word List (NAWL), which is based on a 288 million-word academic corpus. The comparison of the two lists will show how the NGWL and NAWL differ from a nuclear academic word list: (a) Which words occur frequently in the nuclear textbook but are not among the words of the NAWL and (2) to what extent are the NAWL words used in the nuclear textbook. Finally, this study will also look at multi-word units in the form of clusters which play a significant role in technical language. The findings of this analysis will suggest that it is essential to create a list of field-specific words and multi-word units, which would help students to better acquire the necessary technical words and clusters in the nuclear energy field.