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NOUNS AND THEIR EXTENDED UNITS OF MEANING: A CORPUS ANALYSIS OF NOUNS USED IN THE SCIENCE AND ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEXTBOOKS Jayakaran Mukundan Department of Language and Humanities Education Faculty of Educational Studies University Putra Malaysia 43400 UPM SERDANG, Selangor Phone: (60 3) 8946 6000 Malaysia Sujatha Menon English Language Department, Academy of Language Studies University Teknologi MARA Melaka 78000 Alor Gajah, Melaka Phone: (60 6) 558 2000, Fax : 06-558 2001 Malaysia Received/Accepted: 26 June 2008 /17 July 2008 ABSTRACT The teaching of Science and Math in English in Malaysia is an area of great concern to educators and students alike. Both teachers and materials writers are still operating in the dark as it is not quite known what technical English is actually needed to teach these subjects. As there is no existing corpus of the language used in the teaching of Science in schools, there is a great need for a corpus to be built to identify what Scientific English in schools are and how they typically behave. This study looks, in particular, at the use of nouns in the Form One Science and English language textbooks. It centres on a comparative analysis of nouns, their distribution, extended meanings and contexts, in both the Science and English language textbooks. This study will help teachers to identify and pay more attention to the more common choices of noun usage and consider teaching those which are exceptions to the rule.

KEYWORDS Corpus, Science, Nouns, Compounds, Form one 90

Volume 8 No. 2, Agustus 2008 : 90-111 1. BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY At the end of 2002, realising a need for Malaysians to be globally competitive, Malaysia’s former Prime Minister, Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamed, proposed a revolutionary change in the medium of instruction for Science and Math from Bahasa Malaysia to the English language (Parliamentary Report, 2002). The Prime Minister explained that “To achieve a developed nation in the year 2020, there is an immediate need for Malaysians to be able to compete and participate globally, especially in the Science and Technology arenas, and this could only be achieved through mastery of a global language such as the English language.” With the sudden re-introduction of the teaching of Math and Science in English in January 2003, in standard One and forms One and lower Six, concerns regarding the affect of English language proficiency on the performance of students in these subjects were raised by various sectors of the community. In schools, the language used in Science lessons is often context-centred and often very complex. Understanding a new Scientific concept taught in schools may be difficult as it usually sounds abstract and unrelated to students’ everyday activities and experience (Rosenthal, 1996). Even though the achievement or performance levels in the Science and Math subjects in secondary schools in Malaysia have increased from an ‘average’ 70-73% of year 1 and 2 students’ performance in 2004 (reported in New Straits Times, August 4, 2004) to a more than average performance in 2005, Mathematics (84.1%), Science (90.1%) and English (79.8%) (reported in New Straits Times Online, 2005), these results do not indicate any relationship between language proficiency and achievement levels in Science and Math nor can it be assumed that students have a better grasp of the language to have enabled them to achieve a higher performance level. Therefore, there is a need to determine the type of language the students are required to have, whether it is general English or technical language, to be able to cope with the everyday learning of Science in English. The first step into looking at the type of language used and required of students for the 91

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study of Science and Math in English is to create a corpus of the language used in this subject. A corpus would provide a convenient source from which to obtain evidence of the behaviour of many different facets of language: lexical, grammatical and pragmatic (Schmitt, 2000). Once a corpus has been compiled, then the language in it can be analysed. The teaching of Science and Math in English in Malaysia has become an issue, yet both teachers and material writers are operating in the dark, as they are teaching Science and Math in English, when it is not quite known what Scientific or Mathematical English is actually needed in schools. This has meant that materials written for Science and Math in schools have largely been the result of the intuition and experience of the teachers, the curriculum development board and the material writers. As there is not much research on the learning of Science in English in schools as yet, and as there is no existing corpus of the language used in the teaching of Science in schools; there is a great need for a corpus to be built and a greater need for the language to be analysed. To facilitate learning, it is important for a corpus to be created. The creation of a Science corpus would make not only content teachers but also language teachers aware of the type of language which is specific to this subject, and the differences between general English language and technical English language. This work, which is part of a larger study on the language used in Form one Science, Math and English language textbooks, (‘The Language of Form One Mathematics, Science and English Language Textbooks. A Comparative Corpus-Based Study’, unpublished project work, Jayakaran Mukundan and Sujatha Menon, (2006), UPM.), aims to analyze the type of nouns used in prescribed Form 1 Science textbooks in schools. The behaviour of nouns in the Science textbook will then be compared to the general English language used in the prescribed Form 1 English language textbook. This study focuses on the prescribed Form 1 textbooks from the southern zone in Malaysia. 1 2

This research aims to do the following: It describes the distribution and types of nouns found in the Form 1 Science and English language textbooks. It specifies the differences found in the use of nouns in the Science and English language textbooks at a variety of levels.

2. RESEARCH QUESTIONS 92

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In order to find out the type of nouns used in the Science textbook and to see how these differ from the nouns used in the English language textbook, several research questions were formulated. The research questions were developed based on the aims stated above. The main research questions posed were: 1 What is the distribution of nouns in the Science and English language textbooks? 2 What are the differences in noun use identified in the Science and English language textbooks? 3 What are the common multi-word units and collocations found in the Science and English language textbooks? 3. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK 3.1. The Language of Science The language of Science is far different from the languages that students use in other subjects areas (Laplante, 1997). The major difference and problematic areas to learners, especially non-native learners, are the rhetorical-grammatical relationships and the lexical elements of technical vocabulary and noun compounds (Trimble, 1985). Studies carried out on learning and teaching vocabulary for Math and Science have shown the need for students to learn technical and subtechnical words and to recognize the differences between words that are used in everyday context and their meanings in Math and Science (Khisty, 1995, Bernhardt et. al., 1996). There is a need for the integration of language and Science instruction for second language learners as the language demands facing Science learners are very often complex (Laplante, 1997). According to Trimble (1985), the lexical elements that cause the most difficulty to learners are the technical vocabulary, sub-technical vocabulary and the noun compounds. He believes that non-native learners do not usually have a problem with technical vocabulary as it is taught explicitly by content-matter teachers. Sub-technical vocabulary is also considered not very problematic as it can be understood quickly with the use of specialist

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dictionaries. However, the most problematic area for students is compounds (Trimble, 1985). Sub-technical vocabulary, according to Trimble (1985), means both context-independent words that occur with a high frequency across different disciplines of Science, retaining the same meaning across these Scientific disciplines and also words that have one or more ‘general’ English meanings and which in technical contexts take on extended meanings. Noun compounds, on the other hand, are defined as two or more nouns and adjectives that together make up a single concept. He grades noun compounds into four scales based on their difficulty of learning: simple, complex, more complex and very complex (Trimble, 1985:133). The vocabulary of Science has been discussed and categorized by many other linguists. The most notable and one of the earliest categorizations of the lexis of Science was by Cowan (1974), who was widely attributed with the introduction of the concept of sub-technical vocabulary. It was Cowan’s definition of sub-technical vocabulary that Trimble extended in 1985. Cowan described four categories of vocabulary: 1 highly technical words 2 sub-technical vocabulary which he defined as ‘context independent’ words which occur with high frequency across disciplines (Cowan, 1974, p.391) 3 semi-technical and 4 non-technical words, such as hospital, medicine and disease, which he grouped together making no clear distinction between them. Godman and Payne (1981) suggest that the lexis of Science is made up of two elements, which are technical terms - concepts of congruity between scientists - and non-technical terms or common language terms, which are further divided into general language terms and terms which contain basic words for usage in Science. Nation (2001) describes technical vocabulary as those that are recognizably specific to a particular field or discipline. According to Nation and Chung (2003), technical words cover about 5% of the running words in specialized texts and is made up of words that occur frequently in a specialized text or subject area but do not occur or occur with low frequency in other fields. 94

Volume 8 No. 2, Agustus 2008 : 90-111 Nation (2001:198) declares that there are degrees of ‘technicalness’ depending on how restricted a word is to a particular area. These degrees are categorized into four groups: 1

2 3

4

This category is the most technical with the words appearing rarely outside its particular field such as ‘morpheme’ in the field of applied linguistics and ‘pixel’ in the computing field. This category can be described as being similar to Cowan’s (1974) highly technical words. The words here are used both inside and outside this particular field but with different meanings, such as the sub-technical vocabulary of Trimble’s (1985) and Cowan’s (1974). The words are used both inside and outside this particular field but the majority of their uses with a specific meaning are related to this field. Their specialized meanings in this field is readily understood outside the field, such as the word ‘accused’ in the field of Law and ‘memory’ in the computing field (Nation, 2001, p.199). This category is similar to that described by Cowan (1974) as semi-technical. The words here are more common in this field than elsewhere, similar to Cowan’s(1974) non-technical words. There is little specialization of meaning, example ‘judge’ in the field of Law and ‘print’ in the field of computing.

3.2. Collocations Collocation refers to the tendency of two or more words that co-occur in discourse (Schmitt, 2000). Collocation is best described by Sinclair’s (1991) idiom principle. The idiom principle highlights the fact that there are regularities in how words co-occur with each other and collocation covers this notion. Most authors agree that there are two basic kinds of collocations: grammatical/syntactic collocations and semantic/lexical collocations (Bahns, 1993 and Benson, 1985). Grammatical collocations are the type in which a dominant word goes together with a function word such as a noun, verb or adjective followed by a preposition. Examples are ‘abide by’, ‘access to’. Lexical collocations, however, consist of combinations of two equal words such as noun+verb (ball bounces), verb+noun (spend money) and adjective+noun (cheerful expression) (Schmitt, 2000, p.77). 95

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There are many ways to categorize collocations. This study chooses to categorize collocations by looking at their syntactic characteristics as summarized by Nesselhauf (2005), where they are classified according to the word classes in which their elements appear such as those categorized by Hausmann (1989 cited in Nesselhauf, 2005, p.22), adjective+noun, noun+verb, noun+noun, adverb+adjective, verb+adverb and verb+noun. These categories were later added to and expanded by others (Aisentadt, 1981 and Benson et.al (1986 cited in Nesselhauf, p.22) to include verb+noun, verb+preposition+noun, noun+preposition, preposition+noun and adjective+preposition. 4. METHODOLOGY The methodological base of a corpus research is diverse as it not only covers the fields of corpus linguistics but also involves looking into grammatical and lexical relationships and discourse analysis. This study analyses Scientific and English language corpus through discourse analysis. The study is concerned with data of language used in textbooks and uses corpora to investigate the language of Science. This research is grounded in two computerized corpora. A. Population and Sampling in the Science and English language Corpus For the purpose of this study, the population for the Science and English language corpus is defined as the prescribed Science, Math and English language textbooks used by Form 1 students in the southern zone of Malaysia. The books used are 1. Khairi Izwan bin Abdullah, Doris Wee and Teo Hwee Bien, (2002). English Form 1. Carina Lee Yu Ching (Editor). Pustaka Alhas (M) Sdn. Bhd.: Kuala Lumpur 2. Ahmad Salihin bin Mat Saat, Mohd Salleh bin Salehin and Wan Zuraidi bin Wan Zaid, (2002). Science Form 1. Ee Ewe Hock (Editor). Pustaka Sistem Pelajaran Sdn. Bhd. Malaysia: Kuala Lumpur

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Volume 8 No. 2, Agustus 2008 : 90-111 B. Instrumentation:WordSmith Tools 4 WordSmith Tools was designed by Mike Scott (1996, 1997, 1999) for students and researchers to be able to access and analyse corpora at their convenience on their pcs (Scott, 2001). WordSmith Tools provides instantaneous displays of word frequency lists; concordances, which show all the uses of a given word in its contexts, and lists of keywords (Ghadessy, Henry and Roseberry, 2001). The reliability of WordSmith Tools has been verified by numerous studies on various corpus which have used these tools to analyse texts (Flowerdew, 2003, Nelson, 2000, Mukundan, 2004, Scott, 2001and Henry & Roseberry, 2001). C. Procedure For this study, the two textbooks were scanned and converted immediately into txt. files. As scanners nowadays have a built-in OCR software, all the scanned texts were converted into txt. files. As there was distortion to texts scanned, minimal manual correction was done. Then, these txt. files were analysed using the WordSmith 4.0 software programme. D. Detailed Analysis of Data The analysis of data is explained in detail below according to the research questions. Research Question 1: What is the distribution of nouns in the Science and English language textbooks? (a) First using the WordSmith 4 wordlist function, single wordlists of the entire texts of the Science and English language were created to produce one complete list for each of the textbooks. These lists were then manually edited to exclude proper names, numbers, symbols, abbreviations and single letters. (b) From the wordlists above the general statistics and frequency of words were obtained. (c) As there were too many words to be analysed for a small study such as this, the researchers looked at only the first most frequent 1000 words from each list (Nation, 2001). From these first 1000 words, the nouns and verbs were identified.

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Research Question 2: What are the differences in noun use identified in the Science textbook? The nouns used in the Science wordlist were categorized according to Nation’s (2001) and Cowan’s (1974) categories of technical vocabulary. Research Question 3: What are the common multi-word units and collocations found when using nouns in the Science and English language textbooks? The nouns from the Science and English language word lists were further analysed to look at collocational patterns. Step 1: Choice of nouns for further analysis. (a) As there were too many nouns and the analysis of all of these nouns was not feasible, 25 nouns from the Science and 25 nouns from the English language lists were chosen for further analysis. These nouns were chosen based on the frequency of occurrence. Some of the nouns which were highly frequent were not chosen as these nouns were mostly part of the rubrics in the text and thus were not representative of the language used. Step 2: Detailed analysis of nouns. Collocation: The immediate two-word collocates for each word was computed using the Concord-collocation function in WordSmith 4. Then the collocates were analysed, looking at syntactic characteristics or word class combinations: ‘preposition+noun/noun+preposition’, ‘noun+noun’ or compound nouns, ‘adjective+noun’, ‘verb+noun’/noun+verb’, verb+pronoun’, ‘verb+preposition’, ‘verb+adverb’ and ‘adjective+noun’ (Hausmann, 1989, Aisentadt, 1981 and Benson et.al, 1986 cited in Nesselhauf, 2005, p.22). Step 3: Comparison of compound nouns and lexical phrases. (a) As language is learned in chunks (Nattinger & DeCarrico, 1992), a further analysis of the collocations of the 25 nouns in each list were carried out to identify the more frequent compound nouns used (Trimble, 1985 and Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartivik, 1985). These compound nouns were then checked against the Collins Cobuild Advanced Learners Dictionary to identify the collocates which were commonly used in general English language. (b) Common lexical patterns: The cluster patterns of the nouns in the texts were also computed to identify the more common lexical phrase types used.

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5. ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION 5.1. Distribution of Nouns and Verbs Table 1 describes the general statistics of the Science and English language Form One textbooks. The English textbook has eighteen chapters while the Science textbook has seven chapters. However, the English textbook has a slightly lesser number of tokens (running words) than the tokens in the Science textbook. The English textbook has many more types (different words) introduced throughout the textbook compared to the Science textbook. Out of the first 1000 types of words in the English language text, there are 388 noun types and 288 verb types, as described in Table 2. These include all forms of a particular verb or noun. In comparison, there are 457 noun types and 246 verb types in the first 1000 most frequent words in the Science text. It can be assumed that both the Science and English language textbooks have more noun types than verb types and thus can be considered to be more noun-centric. There are more nouns used in the Science text than the English language text but there are slightly more verbs used in the English language text compared to the verbs used in the Science text. 5.2. Categorization of Nouns The noun word families (consisting of the headword, inflected forms and closely related derived forms of the headword, Nation, 2001) in the first 1000 words from the Science text were categorized into technical and nontechnical vocabulary as categorized by Cowan (1974) and Nation (2001). Table 3 lists the nouns from the list according to the four categories: highly technical, sub-technical, semi-technical and non-technical. As there are too many non-technical words, not all the words are listed in Table 3. The majority of the nouns consist of non-technical words or common general English language terms (338 out of 389 nouns), such as ‘water’, ‘air’, ’solution’, ‘weight’. The next largest sub-category is the semitechnical words (39 out of 389 nouns) or words which are usually used both inside and outside the Science field but the majority of their uses with specific meanings are related to this field (Nation, 2001). These specialized meanings in their particular field is readily understood outside the field. 99

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Only a small number of nouns are highly technical and sub-technical words. This finding indicates that the first 1000 words in the Science text contain more general English language and common nouns, which is appropriate for this level of students. However, semi-technical nouns may need to be given more attention, especially for L2 learners of low proficiency in the English language. 5.3. Collocational Patterns and Compound Nouns As stated earlier, a fraction of the nouns from the Science and English language 1000 word lists were further analysed to look at collocational patterns. Table 4 lists all the 25 nouns chosen from each list with the frequency levels stated. Once the words had been chosen, they were concordanced using the WordSmith 4 and then collocations and 3-word cluster patterns of the words were looked at. The purpose of analyzing the collocations and cluster patterns of these words is because language is said to be learnt and stored as lexical chunks and collocations (Nattinger, 1980, 1988, Pawley and Syder, 1983, Nattinger and Decarrico, 1992, Lewis, 1993). However, the analysis undertaken here only provides an overview of a limited number of lexical multi-word items and therefore only scrapes the surface of what could be done. 5.4. Summary of the Collocational Syntactic Characteristics of Nouns The syntactic characteristics of the collocates were derived based not only on the collocational patterns of the words but also on the word cluster patterns. The 2-word collocational patterns of the Science nouns saw a wider variety of word class combinations than the noun collocates in the English language list. The word class combinations of the Science noun collocates ranged from: Science Nouns Preposition+noun/ noun+preposition : Noun+noun (compound nouns) : Noun+verb/ verb+noun

:

of water/water in lime water, air pollution, Litmus paper exhaled air, living things, air contains 100

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:

hot air, everyday life

The word class combinations of the English language noun collocates have some similar syntactic characteristics to that of the Science noun collocates. English Language Nouns Noun Key Words Preposition+noun/noun+preposition : Noun+noun : Adjective+noun :

of water/water in air pollution, national science modern life

On the whole, there is a wider variety of word class combinations among the Science collocates than the English language collocates. The common word class combinations in both the Science and English language texts are the combinations of ‘preposition+noun/noun+preposition’ (28 instancesScience, 17 instances-English language) and ‘noun+noun’ or compound nouns (36 instances-Science, 13 instances-English language). There is another significant combination among the Science noun collocates which is the ‘adjective+noun’(22 instances) combination. In comparison, there are only 3 instances of the adjective+noun word combination among the English language noun collocates. There are also some other syntactic characteristics of the Science collocates which are not paralled in the English language text, specifically the ‘noun+verb/verb+noun’ (18 instances) combination. This type of collocates are reflective of Scientific lexis in textbook. However, whether this type of collocate is specific to Scientific lexis needs to be further analysed.

5.5. Compound Nouns and Lexical Phrases As learning language chunks helps in language processing (Nattinger and DeCarrico, 1992, Lewis, 1993) and since compound nouns (Trimble, 1985) are multi-word units that are considered difficult for students to learn and understand, this part of the study looks at compound nouns and common lexical phrases which appear in the use of these nouns.

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The compound nouns and common lexical phrases are obtained from the word cluster patterns of the 50 nouns analysed in the earlier section. Table 5 lists all the compound nouns, while Table 6 lists all the common lexical phrases. There are more compound nouns and lexical phrases used in the Science text compared to the English language text. The use of many compound nouns in the Science text reaffirms Trimble’s (1985) analysis of a Science discourse where he states that most of the nouns in a Science discourse consist of compound nouns. However, most of the compound nouns are simple compound nouns as defined by Trimble (1985). Some of the lexical phrases above such as ‘resources on earth’, ‘blue litmus paper’, ‘red filter paper’, ‘needs of life’ and ‘test tube holder’ from the science text and ‘ old folks home’ from the English language text are examples of complex compound nouns (Trimble, 1985). The above compound nouns and lexical phrases were referred against the Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary (2006) to find out if they were frequently used multi-word units in general English language. There are five compound nouns from the Science text (test tube, kinetic energy, hot air, daily life, natural gas) and one from the English language text (family tree) which are considered common general English language compound nouns and only one common lexical phrase (daily life) from the Science text (Collins COBUILD, 2006). 5.6. Extended Meanings of Nouns Due to collocations of the selected nouns, many non-technical words such as ‘energy’, ‘heat’, ‘metal’ and ‘paper’ have turned into more technical words with extended meanings attached to the original headword of the noun. Non-technical nouns such as ‘energy’ and ’paper’, when in compound noun form such as ‘heat energy’, ‘sound energy’, ‘nuclear energy’, ‘litmus paper’, ‘graph paper’, and ‘cobalt chloride paper’ evolve into semi-technical and sub-technical nouns with extended meanings. These noun compounds now acquire extended meanings more specific to the Scientific field and more technical in hierarchy. Sub-technical nouns such as ‘cell’ when in compound form such as ‘cheek cells’, ‘cell membrane’ and ‘cell respiration’ become more technical and thus can be categorized as highly technical nouns.

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Volume 8 No. 2, Agustus 2008 : 90-111 However, there is no definite pattern of hierarchy as the collocational patterns of the nouns indicate that the nouns can combine and form compound nouns which may fall into any of the technical and sub-technical noun categories mentioned earlier. In this study, the noun ‘paper’ collocates with the words ‘litmus’ and ‘graph’ to form compounds which are semitechnical in nature. However, when it collocates with ‘cobalt’ and ‘chloride’, the compound nouns are then categorized as highly technical nouns. 6. CONCLUSION There is a need to determine the type of language the students are required to have, whether it is general English or technical language, to be able to cope with the everyday learning of Science in English. This small corpus study on the language used in the Form 1 Science textbooks has provided insights into the type of language students are required to know and need to be able to read and understand their textbooks. As textbooks are an integral part of teaching and learning in schools in Malaysia, it is important for these textbooks to be analysed and assessed. This study on nouns shows that most of the nouns in the Science textbook consist of semi-technical and non-technical words which are simple and considered to be appropriate for this level of students. This implies that there would not be much difficulty in learning new terms or words in the Science text as most of the words should be quite familiar to them. However, semi-technical words, such as ‘density’, ‘vapour’, and ‘respiration’, could pose a problem to L2 learners who have a low proficiency in the English language. Therefore, these words would have to be given more attention in class. However, teachers of Science cannot assume that the students would be able to understand all the forms of the non-technical nouns, as this study shows that many of the non-technical nouns, when in compound noun form, take on a more technical meaning or have extended meanings attached to them. Thus, these compound noun forms would be more difficult to comprehend and use. These words which become sub-technical and semi-technical words would need to be taught explicitly and learnt intentionally (Nation, 2001). This also implies that Scientific lexis contains many multi-word units which are essential to the understanding of the text. Learning 103

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individual words by itself is not enough for a student to be able to comprehend fully a Science text. What is required is an awareness that collocations and multi-word units are an essential part of Scientific English and therefore needs to be taught explicitly and learnt intentionally (Lewis, 1997 and Trimble, 1985). From the analysis of Science and English language collocates and clusters, it can be seen that there is a wider variety of word class combinations among the Science noun collocates than the English language noun collocates. These collocational patterns imply that there is a more complex and varied language system in the Science text compared to the English language text. In conclusion, this study reaffirms previous studies carried out on learning and teaching vocabulary for Math and Science which emphasize the need for students to learn technical and sub-technical words and to recognize the differences between words in general English and their meanings in Math and Science (Khisty, 1995, Bernhardt et. al., 1996). There is no doubt that there is a need for the integration of language and Science instruction for second language learners as the language demands facing Science learners are very complex and different. It is through corpus studies like this that teachers and material writers would be able to check and understand the differences in Scientific English from the general English language and be able to apply this knowledge to the teaching of Science in English and the creation of better Science textbooks.

REFERENCES Bahns, J. (1993). Lexical collocations: A contrastive view. ELT Journal, 47(1), 56- 63. Benson, M. (1985). Collocations and idioms. In R. Ilson (Ed.). Dictionaries, lexicography and language learning (pp 61-68). Oxford: Pergamon.

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Volume 8 No. 2, Agustus 2008 : 90-111 Bernhardt, E., Hirsch, G., Teemant, A., & Rodriguez-Munoz, M. (1996). Language diversity and science: Science for limited English proficiency students. Science Teacher, 63(2), 24-27. Collins COBUILD Advanced learner’s English Dictionary. (2006). Fifth Edition. Glasgow: HarperCollins. Cowan, J.R. (1974). Lexical and syntactic research for the design of EFL reading materials. TESOL Quarterly, 8(4), 389-399. Flowerdew, L. (1998). Corpus linguitics textlinguistics. System, 26, 541-552.

techniques

applied

to

Ghadessy, M., Henry, A. & Roseberry, R. (Eds.). (2001). Small corpus studies and ELT. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Co. Godman, A. & Payne, E.M.F. (1981). A taxonomic approach to the lexis of science. In English for Academic and Technical Purposes: Studies in Honor of Louis Trimble (23-39). Rowley, Masssachusetts: Newbury House. Henry, A. & Roseberry, R.L. (2001). Using a small corpus to obtain data for teaching a genre. In Ghadessy, M., Henry, A. & Roseberry, R.L. (Eds.), Small corpus studies and ELT (pp. 93-113). Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co. Khisty, L.L. (1995). Making inequality: Issues of language and meanings in mathematic teaching with Hispanic students. In W.G. Secada, E. Fennema & L.B. Adajian (Eds.), New Directions for Equality in Mathematics Education (pp. 279-297). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Laplante, B. 1997. Teaching science to language minority students in elementary classrooms. NYSABE Journal, 12, 62-83. Lewis, M. (1993). The lexical approach. Hove, England: LTP. Mukundan, J. (2004). A composite framework for ESL textbook evaluation. Unpublished Doctoral Thesis. Serdang: University Putra Malaysia 105

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Mukundan, J. & Menon, S. (2006). The language of form one Mathematics, Science and English language textbooks. A comparative corpusbased study. Unpublished research project, Serdang, Universiti Putra Malaysia Nation, I.S.P. (2001). Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nation, P. & Chung, T.H. (2003). Technical vocabulary in specialized texts. Reading in a Foreign Language, 15(2). Retrieved 11 November 2005, from http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl/October2003/chung/chung.html Nattinger, J. (1980). A lexical phrase grammar for ESL. In TESOL Quarterly, 14, 337-344. Nattinger, J.R. (1988). Some current trends in vocabulary. In Certer, R and McCarthy, M (Eds.), Vocabulary and language teaching. London/New York: Longman Nattinger, J.C. & DeCarrico, J.S. (1992). Lexical phrases and language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nelson, M. (2000). A corpus based study of business English and business English teaching materials. Unpublished PhD Thesis. Manchester: University of Manchester. Nesselhauf, Nadja. (2005). Collocations in a learner corpus. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Pawley, A. & Syder, F.H. (1983). Two puzzles for linguistic theory: Nativelike selection and nativelike fluency. In Richards, J.C. & Schmitt, R.W. (Eds.), Language and Communication, (pp. 191-225). London: Longman. Rosenthal, J.W. (1996). Teaching science to language minority students. England: Multilingual Matters Ltd.

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Volume 8 No. 2, Agustus 2008 : 90-111 Schmitt, N. (2000). Vocabulary in language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sinclair, J.M. (1991). Corpus, concordance and collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scott, M. (1996, 1997, 1999). Versions (1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0) WordSmith Tools. Oxford: Oxford University Press Scott, M. (2001). Comparing corpora and identifying key words, collocations and frequency distributions through the WordSmith Tools suite of computer programs. . In Ghadessy, M., Henry, A. & Roseberry, R.L. (Eds.), Small corpus studies and ELT (pp. 47-67). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co. Trimble, Louis. (1985). English for science and technology: A discourse approach. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

APPENDIX Table I: General Statistics of Form 1 English & Science Textbooks No. of Chapters Tokens Types

English Textbook 18 45,105 4,730

Science Textbook 7 45,151 3,219

Table II: Distribution of Nouns and Verbs among the First 1000 Words English Words

107

1st

1000

Science 1st 1000 Words

Nouns and their Extended Units of Meaning: A Corpus Analysis of Nouns Used in the Science and English Language Textbooks (Jayakaran Mukundan & Sujatha Menon) Noun Types Noun word families Verb Types

388 332 288

457 389 246

Table III: Categorization of Noun Families (Nation, 2001 and Cowan, 1974) Science Noun Families: First 1000 words HIGHLY SUBSEMITECHNICAL TECHNICAL TECHNICAL Chloroplast conductor Acid Litmus Bob Beaker Methylene Cell Bicarbonate Photosynthesis Compound Biomass Spirogyra matter Burette Waste Calipers Current Condensation Conduction Convection Copper Density Diameter Dioxide Fauna Filtration Fossil Helium Hydroxide Insulator Microorganisms Monoxide Nitrogen Particle Radiation Respiration Sulphur Uranium Vacuum combustion iron Pipette Hydrogen Plutonium Sodium Chloride Cobalt

NON-TECHNICAL ability absorption activity air alcohol aluminium amount animal answer apparatus appliances aqualungs area arms arrangement atmosphere bag ball balloon basin beads beam blank block blood boat body book bottle box brackets brain breeze building bulb candle

dish distance droplets drops dust earth effect efforts electricity element end energy engines evaporation example exercise expansion experiment eye farming figure filter fire flame flask flora food forest form formation fossil fuel function funnel gas gauze

108

Volume 8 No. 2, Agustus 2008 : 90-111 Iodine Mercury Membrane

cans car carbon

generations glass graph

Table IV: Nouns Chosen from the Science and English language 1st 1000 Word Lists Science Nouns Word ENERGY HEAT CELL GAS TUBE TEST MATTER DENSITY BEAKER PARTICLES MASS PHOTO SOURCES PROCEDURE METAL WATER AIR THINGS SCIENCE EARTH LIFE OBJECT PAPER GLASS BODY

Freq. 416 272 161 136 109 125 110 92 90 90 88 85 78 75 40 386 290 106 90 85 82 77 72 67 56

English language Nouns Word Freq. SCHOOL 133 PEOPLE 107 DAY 102 HOME 80 COMPUTER 74 HOUSE 67 CHILDREN 61 FOOD 61 FAMILY 53 PLACE 48 RULES 40 BOY 37 GAME 34 ENVIRONMENT 34 HEALTH 28 WATER 44 THINGS 38 SCIENCE 33 LIFE 26 PAPER 20 AIR 16 OBJECT 11 GLASS 11 EARTH 10 BODY 10

Table V: Compound Nouns which Appear Frequently: Looking at the Chosen Nouns Compound nouns No 1 2 3 4 5 6

109

Science list Word gas jar energy source heat energy sound energy nuclear energy heat conductors

No 1 2 3 4 5 6

English list Word national science centre canteen day air pollution school band school compound old folks home

Nouns and their Extended Units of Meaning: A Corpus Analysis of Nouns Used in the Science and English Language Textbooks (Jayakaran Mukundan & Sujatha Menon) 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

heat insulators test tube test tube holder water level lime water metal bob water vapour air pollution cell membrane cheek cells plant cell animal cell blood cell human body cobalt chloride paper light energy science report solar energy heat rays pond water glass slide glass rod glass tube litmus paper chloride paper graph paper electrical energy chemical energy cell wall cell respiration metal ball Earth resources Exhaled air Renewable energy Heat flow Hot air Living things Filter paper Daily life Everyday life Potential energy Kinetic energy Natural gas Renewable sources Various sources

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

home safety safety rules family members family tree rule number food fair Modern life Little boy National day

110

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Table VI: Common Lexical Phrases which Appear Frequently: Looking at the Chosen Nouns No 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

111

Common Lexical Phrases Science list English list Word No Word Water displacement method 1 Save the environment Keep the air clean 2 Protect the environment Composition of air 3 Old folks home Resources on earth 4 playing the game Blue litmus paper 5 Play a game Red filter paper 6 Wins a game Our daily life 7 Improve your health In everyday life 8 For your health To sustain life Needs of life Test tube containing Test tube holder Properties of matter