Vocabulary and English for Specific Purposes Research - Averil Coxhead 2018

Middle School Mathematics vocabulary list
Specialised vocabulary in secondary school/Middle School

Greene’s (2008; Greene & Coxhead, 2015) Middle School Mathematics Vocabulary List, contains 616 word types, made into 312 word families. The ten most frequent word families are in Table 5.3.

Table 5.2 Examples of mathematical collocations and multi-word units in Barton and Cox (2013)

Table 5.3 The ten most frequent word families in the Middle School Vocabulary List (Greene, 2008; Greene & Coxhead, 2015)

Figure 5.3 A section of teacher talk in the German International School grade 6 Mathematics corpus

Note that area is the third most frequent word family in Table 5.3. Area is a good example of an everyday word which has high frequency and a specific meaning in Mathematics. The Middle School corpus is textbook-based, which is reflected in the high frequency of the words chapter and chapters.