Vocabulary and English for Specific Purposes Research - Averil Coxhead 2018

Middle School Social Studies and History Vocabulary List
Specialised vocabulary in secondary school/Middle School

The Middle School Social Studies and History Vocabulary List (Greene, 2008; Greene & Coxhead, 2015) was selected from a corpus of 26 textbooks which totalled nearly 5,600,000 running words. The list contains 809 word types and 394 families. This list covered 5.83% of the textbook corpus for Social Studies and History. Proper nouns play a major role in these subject areas, and represent up to 5% of the textbook corpus for this discipline. The top ten words in the Middle School Social Studies and History Vocabulary List are in Figure 5.7. These words show that the analysis was based on a written corpus, since chapter is the most frequent word. From there, the words seem to reflect geographical and historical content. The appearance of congress in this top ten list reflects the fact that this corpus comes from textbooks in the USA.

Figure 5.7 The top ten words in the Middle School Social Studies and History Vocabulary List (Greene, 2008; Greene & Coxhead, 2015)