It is conceptually related to specific content and crucial to the instruction of the content. It is highly noticeable and defined in the context. For example, you can read the following sentence in an anthropology textbook: "This way of responding to cultural different behavior is known as ethnocentrism- the belief that one's own culture is most desirable and superior to all others". (Ferraro, 1995, p. 23)
What is a academic word?
It is not salient as content-specific word because it is not directly related to the topic of certain content. It is often used in a variety of contexts and in addition to this, it is extremely difficult to explain. In terms of teachability, although content-specific words are of importance for students to master the content of a particular content, we need to consider that academic vocabulary might be more important for the success in the long run.
Using corpus to search academic vocabulary:
First of all, a concordancer is needed to check the occurrence of the words. When a concordance creates a frequency list, teachers can compare it with the existing list of academic vocabulary (Nation, 2001). This enables teachers become aware of a set of academic words that occur in academic context. Students can work on the frequency list, concordance lines and extended concordance displays for further context with the help of teacher. Teachers can also create their own corpus, uploading the files on the concordance program and make the database for the distribution of the academic words used in the context. Additionally they can encourage students to compare their own definitions or knowledge of the language patterns with the context in the concordance. All these might help raise the awareness of words and inferencing skills.
Reference:
Nation, I.S.P. (2001). Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge: CUP.
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