ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on approaches in research to identifying specialised vocabulary for ESP. Identifying and categorising academic and disciplinary vocabulary for ESP is important for a range of researchers, learners, teachers and dictionary and materials designers. For researchers, identifying specialised vocabulary in ESP is important because there are many outstanding questions in this field of research. Corpora are commonly used in quantitative studies for identifying vocabulary for ESP in corpus-based research. A corpus is a body of texts of written or spoken language, and, increasingly, a corpus can be multi-media. Like corpus comparison, keywords are determined by looking at their frequency in several corpora and using a statistical formula for comparing them with a norm. A major issue in corpus studies is determining the size of the corpus. A corpus needs to be large enough to ensure that sufficient samples of specialised vocabulary occur for analysis or selection in word lists, for example.
