The nature of vocabulary in academic speech of hard and soft-sciences

Little is known about the similarities and differences between the vocabulary in hard-sciences (e.g., Maths, Engineering, Medicine) and soft-sciences (e.g., Business, Law, History), especially in spoken discourse. To address this gap, a Soft Science Spoken Word List (SSWL) was developed for second language learners of soft-sciences at English-medium universities. The list consists of the 1,964 most frequent and wide-ranging word-families in a 6.5 million word corpus of soft-science speech, which represents 12 subjects across two equally-sized sub-corpora. The list may allow learners to recognize 94%–97% of the words in academic speech of soft-sciences. A comparison of the SSWL with Dang's (2018) Hard Science Spoken Word List revealed that although the most frequent 3,000 words are important for comprehending academic speech of both soft- and hard-sciences, the value of these words in soft-sciences is greater than in hard-sciences. Pedagogical implications related to this nature of vocabulary in hard- and soft-science speech are provided.