ABSTRACT
Maxwell makes a very telling point about EAP: 'Nobody is a native speaker of Academic English'. For this reason, research into specialised vocabulary for academic purposes is important from a range of perspectives. The numbers of English language learners studying at university in English-medium institutions began to increase in the 1990s and 2000s and, apart from some times of economic decline when numbers decreased, the trend continues upwards. Studying at university can mean exposure to several million running words a year through reading textbooks, source books, content and learning-based websites and other academic sources of information. A particular difficulty with research in this field is to decide on whether it fits into academic or occupational purposes. Studies into specialised vocabulary in the Sciences in university contexts have found lower levels of coverage of high frequency words than in secondary school texts.
