PROPUESTA METODOLÓGICA PARA LA EVALUACIÓN DE VOCABULARIO ACADÉMICO A TRAVÉS DE LA LINGÜÍSTICA DE CORPUS

Abstract

A methodology for the assessment of academic vocabulary using a checklist able to differentiate among diverse levels of exposition to specific terminology is suggested. A 1, 026, 107 words corpus on Food Science was developed and analyzed giving a total of 871 items. These items were analyzed to identify 54 highly frequent prefixes that were combined with word roots to create 112 non-words that finally, were used to generate a checklist of 160 real words and 40 non-words. The participants were 157 undergraduates of Food Science of two different universities in Querétaro, México. A group of 40 high school students participated as control group. The results revealed that the number of words the participants knew increased according to the number of subjects they had studied and is significantly different among semesters, proving the viability of using these tests to identify different levels of academic vocabulary knowledge.