Abstract:

The probable existing correspondence between computerized corpus based applications and the lexical analysis of the English language is far more obvious today, due to the potential of computerized corpus to offer new insights for the language teaching and learning opportunities. The aim of this descriptive study is to find out the most commonly used content specific lexical items in reference books of Engineering departments at KTU (Karadeniz Technical University, Turkey). Yet, another purpose of the study is to find out the existing lexical similarities among these departments (mainly Engineering) in an effort to match these departments according to the degree of lexical similarity. To this end, a descriptive study with eight engineering fields at KTU were done and introductory level reference books from each of these engineering fields were chosen in consultation with the content area instructors from each fields, They are, then, uploaded to AntConc 3.1.0 software for key word analysis. During the analysis procedures, content specific words were extracted for each field and these content specific words were presented in frequency order in the form of tables and graphics. In the second part of the study, the findings (lexical items) were compared with each other and the fields which include the same or most similar content specific words were grouped together. These groups were, then, analyzed in terms of lexical properties and variations. The results of the lexical analysis showed that there are some correspondences among the various the fields in terms of shared lexical items. The correspondences observed between the above fields in terms of content specific lexical terms indicate that these similarities need to be considered seriously while preparing course content and teaching in the mixed classrooms.

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