Mastersthesis,
A Computer Science Word List
Swansea University, (2013)
Abstract
This study investigated the technical vocabulary of computer science in order to create a Computer Science Word List (CSWL). The CSWL was intended as a pedagogical tool in the instruction of non-native English speakers who are studying computer science in UK universities. In order to create this technical word list, a corpus of 3,661,337 tokens was compiled from journal articles and conference proceedings covering the 10 sub-disciplines of computer science as defined by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The CSWL was intended to be supplemental to both the General Service List (GSL) (West, 1953) and the Academic Word List (AWL) (Coxhead, 2000) and was created using the criteria established by Coxhead (2000) for word selection. The CSWL contained 433 headwords and in combination with the GSL and AWL accounted for 95.11\% of all tokens in the corpus. This was sufficient to meet the lexical threshold for sufficient understanding of a text as proposed by Laufer (1990). This study also conducted research into the technicality of the CSWL by comparison to other corpora, comparison to a technical dictionary and an investigation of the distribution of its headwords against the BNC frequency bands. Overall, the CSWL was found to be highly technical in nature. The final part of the research looked into the existence of multiword units in computer science literature to build a Computer Science Multi-Word List (CSMWL) from the same corpus. A total of 23 items comprised the CSMWL and they were again chosen using the same criteria of range and frequency as established by Coxhead (2000). The CSMWL showed that whilst multi-word units do exist in computer science literature, they are mostly compound nouns with domain specific meaning.
