Applied Linguistics and Urban Planning Nexus: Developing an Academic Word List of Urban Planning Using Corpus Linguistics Approach

Document Type : research article

Authors

Department of Foreign Languages, University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran.

10.22059/jflr.2025.387680.1177

Abstract

Having authentic, technical, and field-specific word lists at the disposal of each academic community is crucial and yet contemporary for the various academic obstacles that need to be addressed in specific fields. Given the numerous vocabularies within a language, especially specific language of a field, it is vital to provide students with vocabularies that they are most likely to encounter with in academic discourses. As such, this study was aimed at establishing a specialized corpus to identify the most prevalent academic words, leading to the development of Urban Planning Academic Word List (hereafter UPAWL). To do so, researchers identified top-tier journals of Urban Planning and included four journals with the highest elite scores (multiplying Impact Factor by Citation Score). To include the research articles of Urban Planning, research articles were required to follow the IMRD format (Swales, 1990) and be published from 2013-2017 and 2018-2022. By applying simple random sampling as well as stratified random sampling, we included 100 articles, bringing about an Urban Planning corpus with 1,252,458 million running words. To develop the academic word list, we followed the Coxhead (2000) criteria, including range, frequency, and specialized occurrence. This process led to identification of 507 word types. The implications for researchers, students and EAP instructors of Urban Planning are also discussed.

Keywords

Main Subjects

References

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Journal of Foreign Language Research
Volume 14, Issue 4
February 2025
Pages 697-715

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