A corpus-based study of an English musicology word list

The aim of this study was to collect the most frequent content words foundin music and music education research articles, and create a list that was validated bymusic experts. The music and music education research article corpus was compiledfrom 300 articles published between January 201 5 – February 2 0 21 from nineinternational journals of SCOPUS and one expert-recommended journal. The musicand music education research article corpus consists of 1,938,216 words. The list's wordselection criteria were based on Coxhead's frequency criterion for academic word lists.Every word family occurring 57 or more times was included in the word list. TheAntWordProfiler (1.4.0) software was used to analyze the frequency of words and togenerate the word list. The results revealed that 67.73 percent of the MWL’s wordsbelonged to first 1,000 of GSL, 5.52 percent of words belonged to second 1,000 of GSL,10.31 percent were AWL, and the other 16.44 percent did not belong to a previous wordlist. There were 5 16 high frequency content words after excluding function words,proper names, and irrelevant words. Following that, three musicologists were asked tojustify the words in the musicology word frequency list. After the justification process,378 terms (72.87%) were deleted from the list, which was then classified into wordfamilies. Thus, the Musicology Word List (MWL) was generated. The MWL aims toprovide key terms for reading research papers to music students and people who areinterested in music to assist in their preparation for musicology-related disciplines. The MWL can also be used in vocabulary pedagogy to help music teachers choose appropriate vocabulary to educate students.