Vocabulary and English for Specific Purposes Research by Coxhead Averil

Author:Coxhead, Averil
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

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bit binary

double an integer data type

host a computer

list a data structure

print a term for outputting data from a program

program(s) in the computer programming sense

root either the ‘superuser’ on a Unix system, the top-level node of a

tree-like data structure,

or the mathematical square root

row in a data structure

string a data type

Radford (2013) used his many years of study and teaching in Computer Science to identify lexical items with a technical meaning in his teaching materials corpus. Table 6.5 shows examples of high frequency specialised vocabulary in Computer Science (occurring over 200 times in the corpus) and their meanings. These lexical items also occur in the second 1,000 words of West’s GSL (1953).

Both Lam and Radford contend that it is the semi-technical words in Computer Science which second language learners struggle most with during their university studies. The ‘fully’ technical words, on the other hand, require effort from all learners, native speakers and non-native speakers of English, and these technical words include a range of content words including proper nouns, acronyms and abbreviations.

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