Lexical and morphological characteristics of medico-Pharmaceutical texts and pedagogical implications

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES DEPARTMENT OF GRADUATE STUDIES NGUY
N TH VÂN HNH LEXICAL AND MORPHOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF MEDICO-PHARMACEUTICAL TEXTS AND PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS (NHNG C IM V MT T V NG VÀ HÌNH THÁI HC CA CÁC V N BN Y-DC VÀ NG DNG TRONG GING DY) M.A. Combined Programme Thesis Field: English linguistics Code: 602215 HANOI, APRIL 2008 IETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES DEPARTMENT OF GRADUATE STUDIES _____________________________ NGUY
N TH VÂN HNH LEXICAL AND MORPHOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF MEDICO-PHARMACEUTICAL TEXTS AND THE PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS (NHNG C IM V MT T V NG VÀ HÌNH THÁI HC CA CÁC V N BN Y-DC VÀ MT S NG DNG TRONG GING DY) M.A. Combined Programme Thesis Field: English linguistics Code: 602215 Supervisor: Dr. Kiu Thu Hng HANOI, APRIL 2008 i STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP This work contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree in any university or other tertiary institution and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, contains no material previously published or written by other person, except where due to references have been made in the text. Hanoi, April 2008 Nguyen Thi Van Hanh ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like first and foremost to express my sincere and deep gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Kieu Thi Thu Huong, for her deliberate guidance and invaluable critical feedback and suggestions during the writing of this study. Her constant support, encouragement and patience are highly appreciated. But for her help, this work would not have been completed. I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere thanks for the support and encouragement from Assoc. Prof. Dr. Le Hung Tien toward the completion of my thesis. I would also like to thank all teachers from the English Department at Hanoi University of Pharmacy for their unconditional support and their useful ideas for my study. Particularly, I owe my thanks to Mrs. Nguyen Do Thu Hoai, Head of the English Department, who has continuously encouraged me and shared with me her experience relating to teaching and learning ESP at HUP. My appreciation is also to the professors who participated in my inter-rater reliability check for their valuable feedback. I am also indebted to all other people whose suggestions, support and encouragement have contributed to the completion of my thesis. iii ABSTRACT English for pharmacy at Hanoi University of Pharmacy (HUP) has been taught for three decades; however, there has been little empirical research on medico-pharmaceutical English texts which are used for this English for Specific Purposes (ESP) course. This research has been conducted in order to provide teachers and students at HUP with a detailed analysis of the lexical and morphological characteristics of the corpus of texts they are working with and drawing implications for teaching and learning. To achieve the above aims, this corpus-based study investigates lexical characteristics of the corpus of medico-pharmaceutical texts used in a pilot ESP course at HUP. This is carried out by classifying vocabulary into four levels using primarily the RANGE program (Nation, 2006) and the four-point rating scale by Chung and Nation (2003), and by exploring the morphological characteristics of this ESP corpus mainly with the Simple Concordance Program (Reed, 1997-2008). The results show that the size and the coverage of technical vocabulary are relevant as compared to the previous results of similar studies, strongly suggesting that the coursebook materials are manageable for students. The morphological analysis presents the frequency, origin, formation, meanings and functions of the most frequently used affixes in the corpus, revealing that there is a high frequency of words in the corpus from technical vocabulary which share the same origin and formation by means of their affixes. The morphological characteristics are, therefore, important in helping students to acquire technical vocabulary. The results brought about by the lexical and morphological analyses in this study suggest various implications for course design, materials evaluation, and materials development, as well as for teaching, learning, and testing ESP at HUP in a narrow focus and in EFL teaching and learning in a wider context. The tools and methods employed in this study are also intended to assist teachers and researchers in the field of ESP to deal with technical vocabulary. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements..............................................................................................................ii Abstract.............................................................................................................................. iii PART ONE: INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................1 1. Rationale ..................................................................................................................... 1 2. Aims of the study........................................................................................................ 2 3. Research questions...................................................................................................... 2 4. Research methods ....................................................................................................... 2 5. Scope of the study....................................................................................................... 4 6. Significance of the study ............................................................................................ 4 7. Structure of the thesis ................................................................................................. 5 PART TWO: DEVELOPMENT......................................................................................6 CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND ........................................................6 1.1. An overview of lexicon ........................................................................................... 6 1.1.1. Some basic concepts.......................................................................................6 1.1.1.1. Word and lexeme .......................................................................................................6 1.1.1.2. Word classes ...............................................................................................................8 1.1.1.3. Closed system versus open classes...........................................................................9 1.1.2. Lexical relations ...........................................................................................10 1.1.2.1. Collocation................................................................................................................10 1.1.2.2. Polysemy and homonymy.......................................................................................11 1.1.3. Word types, word tokens and lemmas..........................................................14 1.2. An overview of morphology.................................................................................. 15 1.2.1. Some basic concepts.....................................................................................15 1.2.2. Inflection, derivation and compounding.......................................................17 1.2.2.1. Inflection....................................................................................................................17 1.2.2.2. Derivation..................................................................................................................18 1.2.2.3. Compounding...........................................................................................................19 1.2.2. The historical sources of English word formation .......................................20 1.2.3. Characteristics of Germanic and non-Germanic derivation .........................21 1.3. Text analysis .......................................................................................................... 22 v 1.3.1. Quantitative versus qualitative text analysis ................................................22 1.3.2. Corpus linguistics and corpus-based approach to text analysis....................22 1.3.4. Tools for corpus-based analyses...................................................................26 1.4. ESP texts................................................................................................................ 26 1.4.1. ESP texts and technical vocabulary..............................................................26 1.4.3. Corpus-based approach and analysis tools in ESP .......................................28 1.5. English for medicine and pharmacy ...................................................................... 31 CHAPTER 2:LEXICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF MEDICO-PHARMACEUTICAL TEXTS AT HANOI UNIVERSITY OF PHARMACY..............................33 2.1. Methodology.......................................................................................................... 33 2.1.2. The selection of texts....................................................................................34 2.1.3. Major methods for data analysis...................................................................35 2.1.4. Major tools for data analysis ........................................................................35 2.1.5. The inter-rater reliability check ....................................................................37 2.1.5.1. Introduction of the inter-rater reliability check......................................................37 2.1.5.2. The results of the inter-rater reliability check ........................................................41 2.2. Lexical features of the corpus of texts at HUP...................................................... 42 2.2.1. Initial description and discussion of the data ...............................................43 2.2.1.1. General statistics of the corpus................................................................................43 2.2.1.2. Processing of the data against the first 2,000 most frequent words in GSL.......45 2.2.1.3. Processing of the data against the AWL................................................................47 2.2.1.4. Processing of the data from word list 4..................................................................48 2.2.2. In-depth description and discussion of technical vocabulary.......................49 2.2.2.1. The size of technical vocabulary in the ESP texts.................................................49 2.2.2.2. The importance of technical vocabulary in the ESP texts....................................51 CHAPTER 3:MORPHOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF MEDICO-PHARMACEUTICAL TEXTS AT HANOI UNIVERSITY OF PHARMACY.......................................................................................55 3.1. Methodology.......................................................................................................... 55 3.2. Discussion of inflectional suffixes in the corpus................................................... 56 3.2.1. Suffix -ed ......................................................................................................56 3.2.2. Suffix -ing.....................................................................................................58 3.3. Discussion of derivational affixation in the corpus ............................................... 60 vi 3.3.1. Suffix –tion ...................................................................................................61 3.3.2. Suffix –al ......................................................................................................62 3.3.3. Suffix –ic, -ical and -ous ..............................................................................63 3.3.4. Suffix -ine, -ium and -ia ...............................................................................64 PART THREE: CONCLUSION ....................................................................................68 1. Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 68 2. Major findings .......................................................................................................... 69 2.1. Major findings concerning lexical characteristics ...........................................69 2.2. Major findings concerning morphological characteristics ..............................69 3. Implications .............................................................................................................. 70 3.1. Implications for course designers, materials evaluators and materials developers .....70 3.1.2. For course designers....................................................................................................70 3.1.3. For materials evaluators..............................................................................................71 3.1.4. For materials developers.............................................................................................72 3.2. Implications for EFL/ESP teaching and learning............................................73 3.2.1. Implications for teachers.............................................................................................73 3.2.2. Implications for students.............................................................................................77 3.3. Implications for testing....................................................................................78 3.4. Other implications ...........................................................................................79 4. Suggestions for further research ............................................................................... 79 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................81 APPENDIX 1 ...................................................................................................................... I APPENDIX 2 ................................................................................................................... IV vii LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES Table 1. Typical differences between lexical words and function words..........................9 Table 2. Germanic and non-Germanic derivation ...........................................................21 Table 3. Association patterns in language use .................................................................24 Table 4. Percentage of each vocabulary level in academic language courses .................27 Table 5. Effectiveness of the four ways of identifying technical terms...........................30 Table 6. Sample classification in the inter-rater reliability check ...................................39 Table 7. Marked words for the inter-rater reliability check.............................................40 Table 8. Inter-rater reliability accuracy score calculated by the number of words assigned to four steps by rater 1 and by the researcher .....................................41 Table 9. Inter-rater reliability accuracy score calculated by the number of words assigned to four steps by the rater 2 and by the researcher ...............................42 Table 10. Coverage of texts by the various levels of vocabulary types and tokens by RANGE program...............................................................................................43 Table 11. Ratio between number of input files and number of types found......................44 Table 12. Word classes vs. word list 1 ..............................................................................45 Table 13. The most frequent words vs. word list 1............................................................46 Table 14. The most frequent words vs. word list 2............................................................47 Table 15. The most frequent words vs. word list 3............................................................48 Table 16. The most frequent words vs. word list 4............................................................49 Table 17. Coverage of levels of vocabulary types in the corpus of ESP texts ..................50 Table 18. Coverage of levels of vocabulary frequency in the corpus of ESP texts...........52 Table 19. A sample of raw data for developing a glossary of technical words.................53 Table 20. A sample of raw data for developing a glossary from low frequency words..................................................................................................................54 Table 21. Past participles and their frequency of occurrences ..........................................57 Table 22. Present participle/gerund and their frequency of occurrences...........................59 Table 23. The most common suffixes in the corpus..........................................................61 Table 24. Words with suffix –ation and their frequency ...................................................62 Table 23. Words with suffix –al and their frequency ........................................................63 Table 25. Words with suffix –ic and their frequency ........................................................64 Table 26. Summary of the most frequently met suffixes...................................................67 Table 27. Sample of an exercise applicable to teaching technical vocabulary..................76 Figure 1. Antonymy and synonymy for polysemic and homonymic words......................13 Figure 2. Word morphological structure ...........................................................................16 viii Figure 3. A sample of word morphological structure........................................................16 Figure 4. A sample of concordance of words with suffix -ed ...........................................56 ix LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Abbreviations AWL : Academic Word List EFL : English as a Foreign Language ESP : English for Specific Purposes GE : General English GSL : General Service List HUP : Hanoi University of Pharmacy TTR : Type-Token Ratio SCP : Simple Concordance Program 1 PART ONE INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale English for Pharmacy was first introduced to pharmacy students at Hanoi University of Pharmacy (HUP) during the 1970s. The course has so far been a remarkable contribution to the university curriculum. Nevertheless, there are some disadvantages posed for the course. English for Pharmacy is currently taught for one semester, which is equal to 45 contact hours. The limited time allotment does not allow the syllabus to cover substantially the subject-matter content. Furthermore, according to the recent survey carried out by the English Department at HUP, 47% of students at HUP thought the ESP course was difficult for them, and the same number of students wanted a longer time allotment for the course. This is explained by the fact that many students feel they do not have time to get acquainted with and practice skills and sub-skills while participating in the course. As a matter of fact, the major tasks throughout the course are concerned with reading comprehension. Besides, other activities such as speaking/presentation or writing are included, but not dominant. The lessons in class are only able to provide them with the