A corpus-based study of vocabulary in conference presentations

Understanding conference presentations is an important but challenging task for EAP learners in their academic careers. Given the importance of vocabulary knowledge for comprehension, this study examines (a) the lexical demands of conference presentations, (b) the coverage of the Academic Spoken Word List (ASWL) (Dang, Coxhead, & Webb, 2017) in these presentations, and (c) the extent to which this list can help EAP learners deal with the lexical demands of these conferences. A 565,758-word corpus was created from conference presentations of 20 academic subject areas. Analysis revealed that together with proper nouns and marginal words, the most frequent 3,000 word families of general English covered 96.84% and the most frequent 5,000 word families covered 98.22% of conference presentations. The ASWL itself covered 87.52% of the academic conference presentation corpus and more than 87% of its sub-corpora. If learners’ prior knowledge of general vocabulary is taken into account, learning the ASWL word families may help users to achieve potential coverage from nearly 95% to 97% of conference presentations. Implications on how to transfer the findings to teaching will also be discussed.