Developing a Vocational Engineering Word List: Bridging the Gaps of Secondary and Tertiary Education

Abstract

There is a meaningful need to have an engineering corpus in Malaysia to bridge the vocabulary gap from secondary to tertiary engineering education. Thus, using the prescribed Malaysian KBSM vocational engineering textbooks, the development of Malaysia’s very own vocational syllabus engineering corpus was facilitated which gave way to the creation of Engineering Word List (EngWL). The word list consists of the properties those of technical and semi-technical engineering lexis. The objectives of the study were summarized as(1) To develop a pedagogic engineering corpus; (2) To create a specific Engineering Word List (EngWL) from the developed corpus. Content analysis (corpus linguistics approach) was used as the research design for the word list creation process. For the purpose of text analysis and concordance, WordSmith Tools Version 5.0 and RANGE were used. As a result, a corpus with the size of 391,505 words (15,619 types) and the EngWL with 841 word families (1,704 types) were created. Hence, lexical products can be utilized by other researchers in the effort of bridging the gaps of secondary and tertiary education.

Keywords: Engineering language; engineering English Word List; engineering lexis; engineering corpus; engineering vocabulary.