English for Specific Purposes 51 (2018) 45–54

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

English for Specific Purposes

journal homepage: http://ees.elsevier.com/esp/default.asp

From the Editors

Developing a frequent technical words list for finance: A

hybrid approach
Angkana Tongpoon-Patanasorn
Department of English, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Khon Kaen University, Khon Kaen, 40002, Thailand

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Technical words are words whose meanings are related to one specific and specialized
subject area, such as Business English (BE). Knowledge of the semantic nuances and
pragmatic uses of these technical words is crucial to developing one’s competence in a
Keywords: particular field. Thus, developing a list of frequent technical words in a given area is a
Technical words necessary resource for those who are teaching and learning English for Specific Purposes
Corpus linguistics
(ESP). The present study develops such a list of frequently used technical words in the field
Finance
of finance by adopting a combined method (Keyword Analysis and a modified rating scale).
The resulting list contains 979 words crucial to finance, which are categorized into 569
word families. These 979 words are listed in both the General Service List (GSL) and the
Academic Word List (AWL) (413 and 291 words, respectively). This study demonstrates
that a combined Keyword Analysis-rating scale method can more effectively identify high-
frequency technical words than can either of these methods used alone. Hybrid methods
are recommended for creating future BE vocabulary lists to overcome the inherent flaws of
individual analytic methods.
Ó 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

The academic field of and everyday use of Business English (BE) has grown rapidly over the past 20 years. English is now
used as a lingua franca among businesses from different countries all over the world. While BE is just one area of English for
Specific Purposes (ESP), it is the most popular and important area of ESP (Belcher, 2006, 2009; Planken, Meurs, & Radlinska,
2010). As St. John and Johnson (1996) noted, the meteoric rise of BE has created a pressing need for educational infrastructure
and materials for BE teachers and learners, including standardized program and course content, textbooks, teachers with
extensive BE expertise, and more. Today, however, teaching materials concerning the linguistic elements of BE are still notably
underdeveloped. Lists of key vocabulary terms within each field of business are not always widely available, but these tools
are pertinent for both teacher preparation and student learning (Dudley-Evans & St. John, 2011; Johns & Price-Machado, 2001;
St. John & Johnson, 1996).
It has been well documented that vocabulary is very important for language learning. A large vocabulary allows English
language learners to comprehend English texts and conversations more easily and to use different technical skills in English
more effectively (Meara, 1996). Vocabulary plays a major role in learners’ success in language learning and academic lives
(Coady, 1997; Donley & Reppen, 2001; Grabe & Stoller, 2002; Nation, 2001). Without sufficient vocabulary, learners may not

E-mail address: angton@kku.ac.th.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2018.03.002
0889-4906/Ó 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
46 A. Tongpoon-Patanasorn / English for Specific Purposes 51 (2018) 45–54

comprehend texts or speak in such a way that succinctly conveys their thoughts (Koda, 2005, 2007; Laufer, 1997, 2003; Lee,
2003). The need for comprehensive vocabulary lists in various domains of BE is therefore quite clear.
Nation (2001) divides a language’s vocabulary into four categories: high-frequency words, academic words, technical
words, and low-frequency words. High-frequency words are words that occur frequently across texts and disciplines and exist
in the first 2,000 most frequent word list, also referred to as General Service Words (West, 1953). Academic words, also known
as sub-technical words (Cowan, 1974) or semi-technical words (Farrell, 1990), are words that have the same meanings across
different disciplines. Technical words are words that occur in specialized texts and have meanings specific to particular ac-
ademic disciplines. The last type is low-frequency words. Words in this group are not commonly used and are rarely found in
texts. In ESP, technical words are the lexical items that are most relevant to learners’ goals (Dudley-Evans & St. John, 2011).
One way to construct a list of such technical words for ESP learners is to examine corpora of BE to determine the most
frequent terms used therein (Dudley-Evans & St. John, 2011). Frequency-based word lists are useful to BE teachers because
they include the words that learners are most likely to encounter in texts (Reppen, 2010; Nation & Waring, 1997). Corpus-
based information helps us “move away from intuition to objectivity” as we choose and develop materials for ESP courses
(Frendo, 2005, p.50). Moreover, learning and teaching words from frequency word lists should help accelerate lexical
acquisition from lower levels of acquisition to higher levels of fluency (Hunt & Beglar, 2005). Such lists of high-frequency
words may therefore make ESP learning more efficient.
It is surprising, then, that reviews of previous literature reveal only a few lexical research studies in the field of Business
English. Nelson (2000) constructed a one-million-running-word BE corpus to compare a list of frequent words from that
corpus with those used in contemporary BE textbooks. He found that the vocabulary lists used in the textbooks were different
from the one derived from his corpus. However, this study did not examine technical words in the BE fielddit focused
exclusively on high-frequency words. Chen, Hu, and Ho (2009) compared the occurrences of academic words in business and
management journal abstracts, which were published in Taiwan and internationally. They found that the international journal
abstracts contained more occurrences of AWL words compared to the Taiwanese journal abstracts. Another study, by Wood
and Appel (2014), compared the incidences of multiword constructions (MWCs) in first-year business and engineering
university textbooks and EAP textbooks. Unsurprisingly, there were great shortcomings of the EAP materials in terms of the
lower range of the MWCs coverage. In a work more closely tied to the present study, Ha (2015) examined technical words in
finance by constructing a 6-million-word corpus of written annual reports and spoken earnings calls. Based on keyword
analyses, Ha categorized words into five groups according to their degree of technicality (i.e., least technical, slightly technical,
moderately technical, very technical, and most technical). She found that the first nine most frequent, most technical words
were accretable, accretive, bancassurance, escrow, lien, liens, mortgage-backed, subprime, and triple-net. However, her corpus
contained only two text types (i.e., annual reports and earnings calls). Similarly, Kwary (2011) included only one text type (i.e.,
textbooks) in his corpus and analysis of technical terms for finance, though this study used a hybrid method (in particular, a
combination of keyword analysis and systematic classification).
While it could be argued that these studies have shed some light on crucial vocabulary items in Business English, only Ha
(2015) and Kwary (2011) focused on technical vocabulary. Furthermore, Ha’s corpus was a compilation of annual reports
and earnings calls; it did not comprise a wide range of text categories that ESP learners may actually encounter in their
studies or subsequent jobs. In contrast, Kwary’s hybrid method focused on the construction of a complete list of technical
terms. It does not give teachers or learners any information about which technical words might be encountered more, or
less, frequently by those studying or working in finance. This is a fundamental oversight, as it does not give ESP teachers
and students any guidance as to where they should focus their efforts. According to Chen and Ge (2007), different
specialized fields and their genres may be diverse in terms of lexical forms and use. The more specialized the field is, the
more specialized word forms and meanings it employs. It is important to make a complete list for each specific discipline
(Chen & Ge, 2007; Hyland & Tse, 2007; Martínez, Beck, & Panza, 2009; Wang, Liang, & Ge, 2008), but it is also important to
help students and teachers meet their goals by honing in on high-frequency technical terms. A list of technical words in
Business English that covers a wide range of text types and that meets the needs of ESP teachers and students will thus be
most beneficial to BE programs.
This is the focus of the present paper: to construct a list of frequent technical words in finance via a combined method,
which is discussed in detail in the Methods section.
This list will be useful to Business English program designers, material developers, and teachers and learners in this area.
The following two research questions will govern the subsequent sections of this paper:

1. What is the proportion of word types (high-frequency words, academic words, technical words, and low-frequency
words) in a compiled corpus named the KKU BE-Finance Corpus?
2. What are the most frequent technical words found in the KKU BE-Finance Corpus?

1.1. Technical words in ESP

Technical words are words whose meanings are tied to one specific subject area, such as engineering, medicine, or
business. They occur frequently in canonical texts in the fields in which they are used. Technical words can be words listed in
the GSL or the AWL.
 A. Tongpoon-Patanasorn / English for Specific Purposes 51 (2018) 45–54 47

However, since their uses are specific to each discipline, these words may carry different meanings when used in different
fields. For example, the word input (information that is put into a computer) is categorized as a high-frequency word in the GSL,
while it is also listed as a technical word in the fields of Engineering (electrical power that is put into a machine for it to use),
Applied Linguistics (sample of language learners receive from their environment), and Business (land, labor, capital and entre-
preneurship needed to produce a good or service). Technical words tend to compose approximately 5–30% of all words in a given
technical text (Chung & Nation, 2003; Nation, 2001, 2008). They are essential for those who want to develop their special
knowledge in a particular field of ESP and in a particular subject area relevant to future employment opportunities or business
relations.

1.2. Methods for identifying technical words

Previous studies have employed five different methods for identifying technical terms: technical dictionaries (Nation,
2001; Oh, Lee, Lee, & Choi, 2000), use of context clues (Flowerdew, 1992), Keyword Analysis (Anthony, 2004; Scott, 1997),
rating scales (Chung & Nation, 2003), and hybrid methods (Kwary, 2011).
The first method to identify technical words is the use of technical vocabulary dictionaries (Nation, 2001; Oh, et al., 2000).
Oh et al. (2000) used definitions from technical dictionaries to develop a Japanese term extraction program, which calculates
the distance score between subject areas using a specially designed formula. The farther apart the subject areas are, the more
likely a term is to be a technical term. Nation suggests a far simpler algorithm for identifying technical words: if a word occurs
in any technical dictionary, it is considered a technical word. While easy to follow, this method is likely to ignore some higher-
and some lower-frequency technical words, as it is hardly a scientifically rigorous method. Instead, it is more tautological in
nature. The thinking is essentially as follows: If a word is technical, it must be in a technical dictionary somewhere. Addi-
tionally, these lists include no information about word frequency with respect to other technical terms and, therefore, offer no
guidance about how learners should focus their efforts in that area of BE.
The second method is the use of textual clues to determine technical terms (Flowerdew, 1992). Analysts use this method to
identify technical words according to three criteria: 1) their definitions; 2) typographical clues, such as bolding, italics, and
brackets; and 3) their appearance in labels, diagrams, or illustrations. The primary problem with this method is that it relies
on the researcher’s personal judgment for interpreting and applying these criteria. As a result, different researchers are likely
to arrive at different conclusions when analyzing the same sample.
Another less subjective method used by BE analysts is Keyword Analysis (Anthony, 2004; Chung, Chao, & Hsieh, 2009;
Scott, 1997, 2001). Keyword Analysis is one type of analysis performed by concordance programs such as WordSmith
Tools, AntConc, and VocabAnalyzer. To complete a Keyword Analysis, a concordance program compares a word list of a newly
compiled corpus with a reference corpus, which is a corpus of general texts (e.g., the Brown Corpus). The program then
automatically produces a list of keywords that occur unusually frequently in the compiled corpus (i.e., positive keywords)
compared to the reference corpus. This method does not prevent general words and academic words from being included in
the resulting list; the list of keywords produced by such analyses is exhaustive. Furthermore, it is generally accepted that the
words contained in a positive keyword list may or may not be technical words.
The final individual method that appears in the literature is the rating scale, which was originally proposed in Chung and
Nation (2003). Chung and Nation developed this four-point rating scale to determine the strength of the relationship of a
word to one particular subject.
One-point words are the least technical words on the scale, whereas four-point words are the most technical. The four
points on the scale are as follows:

1. Words that have no meaning specific to a particular subject,

2. Words that have a meaning minimally related to a particular subject,
3. Words that have a meaning closely related to a particular subject, and
4. Words that have a meaning specific to a particular subject.

Only three- and four-point words are considered truly technical words. This rating scale is applied by experts in a given
area to a list of possible technical words in order to construct a final list of technical words in a given field. Chung and Nation
(2003) compared this method with other existing methods (e.g., technical dictionaries and textual clues). They found that the
method was more accurate than the other methods and that it had a high agreement rate among analysts (95%). Nevertheless,
this method has two flaws. First, it is not clear how the list of possible technical words was constructed: whether evidence-
based or intuition-based. Second, it is time consuming for experts to examine words in context in a given field and check their
meanings against the four-point rating scale. It is neither practical nor scalable.
Hybrid methods thus seem the most promising overall, as they combine methods in such a way that may compensate for
the weaknesses of any individual method. Recently, Kwary (2011) proposed a combination of the Keyword Analysis method
and a systematic classifications method which was mainly used for choosing lexical entries for specialized dictionaries to
construct a list of technical terms. The major strength of this method is that it can generate a list of multi-word units.
However, it fails to provide any information about the relative frequency of those technical words. ESP teachers and students
using lists designed in this way are then left with no information about how they should focus their studies in a given BE field.
48 A. Tongpoon-Patanasorn / English for Specific Purposes 51 (2018) 45–54

According to Nation (2008) and Nation & Waring, 1997, learners should put the most effort into learning words that they
are most likely to see in texts (i.e., high-frequency technical words). To identify high-frequency technical words in finance, the
present study combines two methods: the keyword analysis method and Chung and Nation’s rating scale. Keyword analysis
has an advantage because it results in a list of both academic and general words that occur frequently in specialized texts. In
addition, this study adopted a rating scale method because it has been shown to be the most accurate and consensus-driven
way to identify technical terms (Chung & Nation, 2003). The original method has been modified such that it only includes 3
points: non-technical words (a collapsed category of one- and two-point words), words closely related to a particular subject,
and words specific to a particular subject. This scale is described in greater detail in the subsequent section.

2. Methodology

2.1. The design of the KKU-BE-finance corpus

The corpus used in the present study is a sub-corpus of the KKUBE Corpus (Tongpoon-Patanasorn, 2017), which is, itself, 16
million running words. The KKU-BE Corpus and the KKU-BE-Finance Corpus take into account four major factors in their
design: representativeness, sampling, balance, and size (Biber, 1993; Biber, Conrad, & Reppen, 1998; McEnery, Xiao, & Tono,
2006; Sinclair, 1991). These four factors are described below.

1. Representativeness

The boundaries of the target population were determined to be texts written between 2001 and 2010. The hierarchical
organization (i.e., major text categories) was determined by consulting two experts in business who teach at a tertiary level.
They were chosen because they were able to effectively provide lists of materials that students in this area were likely to
encounter. These experts were asked to prioritize and identify the text categories that should be included in the present
corpus. The resulting list contained four text categories: textbooks, academic journals, websites, and newspapers.

2. Sampling

In this present study, the population is written texts in the business field from four text categories: textbooks, academic
journals, websites, and newspapers. The sampling frame was published texts (i.e., texts printed in multiple copies for dis-
tribution and/or copyright registered) (Biber, 1993). Texts from each category were randomly selected to enhance the
representativeness of the corpus. Specifically, finance textbooks were randomly selected from finance textbooks available in
the KhonKaen University Library, which provides access to both national and international volumes. Specifically, only in-
ternational volumes were included in this study. Experts were asked to give a list of finance-related academic journals and
websites likely to be used by teachers and students. For newspapers, finance news/articles from the three English newspapers
in Thailand (i.e., Nation, Bangkokpost, and Business Day) were included.

3. Balance

To attain the goal of balance, the sub-corpus used contains an equal number of running words from each type of text
publication (i.e., books, research articles, newspapers, and websites). Approximately 500,000 running words were included
from each category, for a resulting sub-corpus of approximately 2 million running words.

4. Size

The KKU-BE-Finance Corpus contains 2,004,964 running words collected from four major text categories, as previously
described. Corpora which feature in previous studies range between 40,000 and 2,000,000 running words (Alcantar, 2007;
Chung, 2009; Coxhead, 2000), while other well-known corpora, such as the Brown Corpus, contain only 1 million running
words. The size of the sub-corpus utilized here is therefore considered sufficient for the purposes of this study.
Table 1 contains the exact number of texts and words extracted from each text category for inclusion in the sub-corpus.

Table 1
Text categories of the KKU BE corpus.

Text Category Number of Texts Running Words

Books 21 575,613
Journals 79 548,265
Websites 532 433,881
Newspapers 527 447,205
Total 1,159 2,004,964
 A. Tongpoon-Patanasorn / English for Specific Purposes 51 (2018) 45–54 49

2.2. Research tools

Three research tools were used in this study: WordSmith, AntConc, and a Technical Word Checklist. WordSmith Version 6, a
concordance program created by Mike Scott (2012), was used to generate word lists of high-frequency words and keyness
indexes for those words. AntConc Version 3.4.3, created by Laurence Anthony (2014), was used to generate a list of keywords
(i.e., words that occur more frequently in the input text than a general corpus) using its Keywords Analysis algorithm. Those
words that occur more frequently in the input text are understood to be closely related to that field (i.e., they may be technical
words in that field).
The Technical Word Checklist used in the present study was adapted from Chung and Nation’s (2003) rating scale. Chung
and Nation (2003) created this rating scale to identify technical words by rating each word on a list of potential technical
words according to a four-point scale. As mentioned previously, only three- and four-point words are considered truly
technical words (Chung & Nation, 2003). The original scale was adapted for the current study to include only three points. The
first two levels were combined in order to focus on the distinction that is most relevant to BE teachers and learners: whether
the given words are technical or not. Since words of both one and two points are classified as non-technical words, these
points are combined. The third and fourth points on the scale are delineated by clearer and more relevant distinctions; three-
point words may be technical, whereas four-point words are definitively technical. The revised scale, since it is simplified,
may also be easier to use, thereby saving time for those experts who must rate word lists containing several thousand words.
The checklist has three levels:
Level 1 words are not related to the field and are used in general language.
Level 2 words are likely to have a particular meaning in a given field and be used in both general and specific texts.
Level 3 words have specific meanings unique to a given field.
A word is considered a technical word if it is rated as Level 2 or Level 3. Figure 1 shows a sample of what a checklist
used by an expert rater looks like.
Chung and Nation (2003) note that a rating scale is only effective if it is employed consistently across raters, so rater
consistency must be reported in any resulting research. To measure rater consistency in the current study, the degree of
agreement between the two expert raters was tested. As previously stated, these two raters are finance teachers at the tertiary
level. This reliability test shows a high rate of agreement between the two raters: 0.87, or 87%.

2.3. Data collection

The KKU BE-Finance Corpus, which contains written texts that were published between 2001 and 2010, was constructed
following the corpus design principles explained in prior sub-sections (i.e., representativeness, sampling, balance, and size).
Textbooks were randomly selected from the KKU library, scanned, and saved as text files. These text files were examined and

Figure 1. Sample of the vocabulary checklist.

50 A. Tongpoon-Patanasorn / English for Specific Purposes 51 (2018) 45–54

edited to remove erroneous titles, graphs, acknowledgements, references, and other words and symbols that may have been
incorrectly transferred during the scanning process. Pages of the textbooks were then randomly selected to meet the set
criteria of 500,000 words per category. Texts of research articles, website articles, and newspapers were available through the
KKU database and internet system. The approximate total number of running words included in the sub-corpus is 2 million.

2.4. Data analysis

To identify frequent technical words, a combination of two methods was adopted: Keyword Analysis and a three-point
rating scale adapted from Chung and Nation (2003). After a list of frequent words was obtained, the Keyword Analysis
was conducted using AntConc. The Keyword analysis compared the list of words from the target corpus with that of a
reference corpus. The reference corpus used in this study was the British Academic Written English (BAWE) Corpus created by
Hilary Nesi, Sheena Gardner, Paul Thompson, and Paul Wickens (Alsop & Nesi, 2009). The BAWE contains 6,506,995 words.
This corpus was used as a reference corpus because it is a corpus of written English, which is similar to the corpus created in
this present study, and it is available for free online.
The list of possible technical words generated from the Keyword Analysis contained 3002 words. Function words, proper
nouns, and symbols have been excluded from these results. In this study, acronyms and abbreviations were kept in the list
because they are commonly used in technical writing (Alred, Brusaw, & Oliu, 2012; Reep, 2010) and are therefore necessary for
second language learners to learn. Two experts in finance then rated the technicality of these words using the three-point
scale designed especially for this study. The agreement rate between them was 0.87, or 87%.

3. Results and discussion

Table 2 shows the proportion of GSL words, AWL words, and rare words (or infrequent words). As seen, this sub-corpus
comprises primarily general-use words (approximately 75%, combining the GSL 1K and 2K words), with only 10–11% of the
words being academic words (approximately 10–11%) and the other 14% being categorized as “others.”
The proportions of word types in the KKU BE-Finance Corpus are slightly different from those documented in previous
studies. Nation and Waring (1997), Nation (2001, 2008), and Coxhead (2000) found that the General Service List (GSL) ac-
counts for approximately 80% of most corpora, while academic words account for 10%, and the other 10% are rare words (5%)
and technical words (5%). In contrast, the GSL accounts for approximately 75% of the words in the corpus here, not 80% as
stated in the literature. The category of “others,” which includes rare words, is 14.34% here.
Of the list of 3,002 potentially technical words, 979 words were identified as technical by the two experts (i.e., they were
rated a 3 on the 3-point scale). The list was then further refined adopting Bauer and Nation’s (1993) 6-level criteria for word
families. As such, in this study, words related to or belonging to the same family (i.e., base form and its inflected forms or
affixes) were grouped together. Base forms were categorized as headwords of a given category, and those that occur most
frequently in the constructed corpus are italicized. A list of high-frequency technical words was then constructed.
The final list of high-frequency technical words contains 569 headwords and their word families. Their frequencies and
coverage are also presented in the list, with the frequencies and coverage of the family members in parentheses. The first 40
most frequent technical words in finance with their coverage are presented in Table 3, along with their corresponding word
families. As seen below, the most frequent technical words in finance are financial, value, debt, firm, cash, stock, capital,
company, bank, and interest. These words differ from those that appear on Ha’s (2015) list, which included accretable, accretive,
bancassurance, escrow, lien, liens, mortgage-backed, subprime, and triple-net. This may be because Ha’s corpus contained only
one written and one oral text type (i.e., annual reports and earnings calls), while the present study includes four text types.
It is also important to note that the final list of 569 technical words contains 16 frequent abbreviations and acronyms found
in the BE corpus (see Table 4 for details).
The final high-frequency technical word list was then compared to the GSL and AWL lists. It is worth noting that many of
the words marked as technical words by the experts are listed in the GSL or AWL. The exact percentages of those words found
on the given lists are shown in Table 5.
Table 5 shows that of the list of 979 technical words (569 headwords and their word family members), 413 words appear in
the GSL (42.18%), 291 words appear in the AWL wordlist, and 275 words do not appear on either of these lists. Thus, a high
number of the technical words identified by the experts (704 words or 71.91%) would be overlooked when creating a word list

Table 2
Proportions of word types in the KKU BE-Finance Corpus.

Disciplines Types of words Token Type

No. of Tokens Percent No. of Types Percent

Finance GSL 1K 70,51,326 69.86 3951 2.66
GSL 2K 532,765 5.28 3339 2.25
AWL 10,61,733 10.52 2905 1.96
Others 14,47,601 14.34 138,336 93.14
Total 100,93,425 100 148,531 100
 A. Tongpoon-Patanasorn / English for Specific Purposes 51 (2018) 45–54 51

Table 3
The 40 most frequent technical words in finance.

Freq. Coverage (%) Technical words in Finance Freq. Coverage (%) Technical words in Finance
6864 0.34 Finance: financial, financed, 2777 0.14 Money
(14,429) (0.72) finances, financially, financing (2777) (0.14)
6707 0.33 Value: valuation, valuable, 2502 0.12 Income
(8696) (0.43) Valued, values (2502) (0.12)
5875 0.29 Debt: debts 2336 0.12 Fund: funding, funded, funds
(6074) (0.30) (4107) (0.20)
5649 0.28 Firm: firms 2142 0.11 Sales: sale
(10,920) (0.54) (2746) (0.13)
5280 0.26 Cash 2133 0.11 Corporate: corporation,
(5280) (0.26) (3071) (0.15) corporations
4994 0.25 Stock: stockholder, stockholders, 2113 0.11 Net
(6466) (0.32) stocks (2113) (0.11)
4786 0.24 Capital: capitalist, capitalists, 1988 0.10 Expect: expected,
(5164) (0.26) capitalization (2629) (0.13) expectations
4012 0.20 Company: companies 1987 0.10 Period: periods
(6270) (0.31) (2510) (0.13)
3912 0.20 Bank: bankers, banking, banks 1557 0.08 Pay: payable, paying,
(5901) (0.29) (4635) (0.23) payment, payments, pays
3892 0.19 Interest: interests 1552 0.08 Variable: variables,
(4037) (0.20) (4779) (0.24) variation
3875 0.19 Risk: riskier, risks 1518 0.08 Future: futures
(4487) (0.22) (1880) (0.09)
3612 0.18 Business: businesses 1499 0.07 Ratio: ratios
(4137) (0.21) (1931) (0.10)
3535 0.18 Invest: investments, investing, 1494 0.07 Exchange: exchanges
(8565) (0.43) investment, invested, investor, (1612) (0.08)
investors
3463 0.17 Price: priced, prices, pricing 1483 0.07 Foreign
(5387) (0.27) (1483) (0.07)
3458 0.17 Equity 1479 0.07 Security: securities
(3458) (0.17) (2415) (0.12)
3388 0.17 Asset: assets 1473 0.07 Project: project, projects,
(6878) (0.34) (2496) (0.12) projected, projections
3155 0.16 Tax: taxable, taxation, taxed, 1435 0.07 Analyze: analyses, analyst,
(4667) (0.23) taxes (2195) (0.11) analysts, analysis
3133 0.16 Return: returned, returns 1425 0.07 Loan: loans
(5119) (0.26) (2592) (0.13)
3109 0.16 Cost: costs 1406 0.07 Common: commonly
(3109) (0.16) (1501) (0.07)
3049 0.15 Credit: creditor, creditors, credits 1399 0.07 Issue: issuers, issued, issuer,
(3544) (0.18) (3665) (0.18) issues, issuing

Table 4
List of frequent abbreviations and acronyms.

Freq. Abbreviations/Acronyms Freq. Abbreviations/Acronyms

461 VC ¼ Venture Capital 94 corp ¼ corporate
371 CEO ¼ Chief Executive Officer 92 IMF ¼ International
Monetary Fund
353 GDP ¼ Gross Domestic Product 91 GM ¼ General Manager
296 IPO ¼ Initial Public Offering 89 mar ¼ margin
199 CFO ¼ Chief Financial Officer 87 Ltd ¼ limited
160 EPS ¼ Earning per Share Org ¼ organization
111 RST ¼ Retail Sales Tax 87 SME ¼ small and medium
enterprises
107 ROE ¼ Return on Equity 55 PE ¼ Price-Earnings Ratio

Table 5
Vocabulary profile of finance technical terms.

Families Types Tokens Percent

K1 Words (1–1000): 194 325 327 33.40%
K2 Words (1001–2000): 61 83 86 8.78%
AWL Words (academic): 150 286 291 29.72%
Off-List Words: ? 273 275 28.09%
405þ? 967 979 100%
52 A. Tongpoon-Patanasorn / English for Specific Purposes 51 (2018) 45–54

with some computerized methods (e.g., a Vocabulary Profile) because only off-list words appear in the output of those
programs. Thus, it is possible to say that the Vocabulary Profile achieved a 28.09% accuracy rate in identifying technical words
for finance.
The Keyword Analysis method has been previously criticized because it generates an exhaustive word list; not all words
contained in the output may be true technical words (Nation, 2001; Sutarsyah, Nation, & Kennedy, 1994). The results of the
present study also confirm that not all words on a list generated by Keyword Analysis are technical words, as the experts
chose only a subset of the analysis’s output for the final list. The list of potentially technical words generated by the Keyword
Analysis contains 3,002 items, of which only 569 were rated as technical. These findings confirm that Keyword Analysis may
not be a reliable method for creating technical word lists for use in ESP classrooms.
The present findings also suggest that technical words must be identified at a multi-word level. In the final technical
wordlist, some words appear to be general words, but they were classified by the experts as technical words. For example, in
general use, the word exercise means to do sports or physical activities in order to stay healthy and become stronger or to use a
power, right, or quality that you have (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, 2015). However, when the phrase
exercise price is used in finance texts, it takes on the technical meaning of the price at which the underlying security can be
purchased (call option) or sold (put option). A post hoc analysis was conducted to identify further technical phrases that
contain general words. The results generated from the Concord function of WordSmith tools show that the following words
often appear in collocations: exercise price (frequency of co-occurrences ¼ 155), exercise value (frequency of co-
occurrences ¼ 31), and exercise period (frequency of co-occurrences ¼ 23). It should be noted that Kwary (2011) criticized the
use of multi-word cluster analyses in BE research because each word needs to be analyzed individually. The post hoc method
used here, however, is less time-consuming and provides frequency information about words that often cluster together.
Finally, when lists of potentially technical words are evaluated by experts, those experts have no context for how the words
are being used in the text. Without context, experts may not know whether a given word or phrase is being used in a technical
or general way in situ. Therefore, future studies should perhaps develop a checklist that provides context assistance, such as
an online checklist that hotlinks to the sentence in which that instance of the word appears.

4. Conclusion

The present study examined the proportion of word types extracted from the 2-million-word KKU BE-Finance Corpus and
developed a list of high-frequency technical words in finance using a hybrid methodology. The proportion of the word types
found in this study is slightly different from those documented in previous studies, with a lower percentage of the GSL (75%)
and a higher percentage of low-frequency words (14.34%). The hybrid methodology is shown to be more effective and ac-
curate in identifying technical words than other methods used in isolation. The study presents a usable list of high-frequency
technical words for future ESP teachers and learners to use. The list was derived from texts ESP learners are likely to encounter
when reading, which is among the very first skills learners need to acquire. It contains 979 words (569 headwords and their
family members). Moreover, the list informs the user about word frequency with respect to other words. As such, it helps
teachers and students make more effective decisions when choosing words to teach and to learn. It is well accepted that
acquiring technical vocabulary is crucial to the future success of second-language learners in their specialized areas of study.
Nevertheless, technical words and their definitions, as well as examples of how the words are actually used in context, are
often not taught in English language classrooms. This is most likely because language teachers have limited knowledge in the
specialized field; thus, they need existing materials such as the list created here to provide to students to help make their
limited learning time more efficient.

4.1. Pedagogical implications

The technical word list developed in this study can be useful for curriculum designers, material developers, teachers, and
learners in the field of finance. The list can be used to identify target words for program learning goals, course books, and
vocabulary activities and tests. It should be learned independently and in meaningful contexts. By deliberately learning
technical words from a list using tools such as word cards or flash cards, EFL and ESL learners (particularly low-level learners)
can effectively incorporate a large number of needed technical words into their lexicons and benefit from expanding op-
portunities to develop receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge. Learning words purposively can be especially useful
for EFL learners who do not have the opportunity for exposure to large amounts of input compared to their first-language
counterparts. In addition, technical words should be introduced from meaning-focused input and practiced with meaning-
focused output activities to strengthen learners’ word knowledge and enhance their productive knowledge of the target
words. For instance, learners could read and listen to terms in finance-based texts to improve their reading and listening
comprehension and then use those words in speaking and writing activities related to finance. The technical words intro-
duced in the curriculum should be selected based on the frequency with which they occur in the list to increase opportunities
for word encounters. Words that occur more frequently in the list are likely to appear both early in the program and
repeatedly thereafter and thus tend to be more useful to learners. Also, abbreviations and acronyms should be introduced
early toward the beginning of the course along with their full forms. Last but not least, the word list should contain target
words for language tests to assess learners’ needs for technical words at the outset of the finance program, to measure their
vocabulary knowledge during the course of study, and to track their technical word development by the end of the course.
 A. Tongpoon-Patanasorn / English for Specific Purposes 51 (2018) 45–54 53

Learners who are equipped with high-frequency technical words, such as those in the list developed in this study, are likely to
achieve higher levels of vocabulary learning in their areas of specialization.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Khon Kaen University (Grant No. 73/2010) for supporting this research project. I would also like to
thank two anonymous reviewers for their insights.

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Angkana Tongpoon Patanasorn is an assistant professor at Khon Kaen University, Thailand. Her research interests include Business English, Corpus Lin-
guistics, Second/Foreign Language Teaching, and Second Language Acquisition.