Developing an academic word list in business news articles: a corpus-based study

This study has two main objectives: (1) to examine the coverage of Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) items and (2) to create a word list based on the Business News Article Corpus (BNAC). The corpus was compiled from business news articles published between January and February 2023, sourced from the business sections of the CNN, BBC, The Guardian, and The Reuters websites. The BNAC comprises 1,258,448 running words. To generate the word lists, 235 text files were processed using AntWordProfiler, resulting in two initial lists: the Business News Articles Academic Word List (BNAAWL) and the Business News Articles Specialized Word List (BNASWL). The findings revealed that although AWL and specialized vocabulary specific to the business field appeared less frequently, they still had a notable presence in business news articles, accounting for 21.22% (279 words) and 18.33% (241 words), respectively. Following a validation process involving three experts, 35 items were removed from the BNAAWL, leaving 301 words, while 108 items were removed from the BNASWL, resulting in 201 remaining items. These two lists were then merged to create a finalized word list consisting of 502 items. This comprehensive list aims to cater to the lexical needs of both academic and field-specific students. The study highlights that EAP and ESP practitioners can effectively utilize business news articles as supplementary resources for material design, encouraging students to independently engage with such articles to enhance their academic and specialized vocabulary.