Abstract:
“Linguists have always used the word corpus to describe a collection of naturally occurring
examples of language, consisting of anything from a few sentences to a set of written texts or tape
recordings which have been collected for linguistic study” (Susan Hunston, 2002). A ‘Dedicated
Corpus’ or a ‘Specialized Corpus” is a corpus made up of specialized texts. With the development
of Computational Linguistics, corpus access software programs, or concordancers, are used to
access electronic corpora in order to make linguistic observations of various kinds.
Objectives of this research are to compile a corpus of the spoken academic discourse of the Faculty
of Applied Sciences of the Rajarata University of Sri Lanka and to make a linguistic analysis of the
compiled corpus using an online concordancer in order to recognize the most frequent lexis and
structures, which can be incorporated into the syllabus and teaching of the target English language
teaching situation.
For the purposes of the present research, a representative sample of the lectures delivered by the
lecturers of the four disciplines of Applied Sciences offered by the faculty was video recorded
and the recordings were transcribed and, then, the transcripts were analyzed using the online
concordancing program, ‘Compleat Lexical Tutor’.
The analysis of the compiled Rajarata Corpus of Academic English (RACAE) (2009) through six
of the tools of the concordancer, viz. VocabProfile, Frequency, Range, KeyWords, N-Gram, and
Concordance, shows that the lexis and structures of the Applied Sciences spoken academic discourse
are more ‘general’ rather than being ‘specialized’, as emphasized in the target English language
teaching program. The results also reveal that the realization of the structures for ‘definitions’,
‘classifications’, and ‘exemplifications’, in the spoken academic discourse is different from those
prescribed in the English language teaching text books.
