The Lexical Profile of Laboratory Animal Science Review Articles: The Uses of Collocations and Purposive Writing Patterns
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Abstract
The corpus studies of words and concordance lines in various fields were widely investigated, but there were few studies examined on the collocations and purposive sentences in the field of laboratory science. Such rare studies can make ESP learners, science and technology students in particular, more aware of the significance of learning collocations and language patterns for effective academic writing. Thus, the current study aims 1) to investigate the grammatical and lexical collocations occurring in the content words of the Outside Word List (OWL) and 2) to analyze the patterns used to state the purposes of the study in laboratory animal science review articles. There were 555,526 running words in the 100 research articles of the Institute of Laboratory Animal Research (ILAR) journal between 2010 and 2014. AntConc (3.4.4) was used to count word frequency and create a laboratory animal science wordlist. Then the concordance lines for the highest-frequency words were analyzed to find grammatical and lexical collocations and the purposive function. The data were analyzed and displayed as percentages and frequencies. The results showed that most lexical collocations appeared in the following four patterns: noun + noun (55.81%), noun + verb (17.83%), adjective + noun (14.15%), and verb + noun (7%). Grammatical collocations were found only in the pattern of noun + noun (4.26%). The results demonstrated that purposive sentences used a main verb with to-infinitive to express the objectives of the study. The implications of the study are beneficial for students and novice researchers in writing development and more contribute to teaching and learning pedagogy in ESP course design. The results are advisable for ESP teachers, especially teachers in English for Science and Technology and Academic Writing classes, to integrate a lesson concerning collocations and language patterns into their courses in order to teach students how to write professionally in scholarly contexts.
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