On one hand, the University of Kragujevac, Serbia, needs an ESP course in ecology; on the other hand, the available wordlists do not meet fully meet the needs of the target group of students, i.e., the undergraduate ecology students. This discrepancy served the a main incentive for creating an institution-specific word list of key content words found in a corpus compiled from English-medium textbooks intended for ecology students (here referred to as the Eco-Text corpus). The keyword list was generated in AntConc, with a keyness measure threshold automatically set at p < 0.055 (3.84 with Bonferroni correction). After the list was complete, the NGSL (New General Service List), NAWL (New Academic Word List), and the SWL (Science Word List) Highlighters were used to further systemize the words into four sublists. In addition to presenting some key findings, we also suggest areas for further refinement. Although preliminary, the findings can be useful to practitioners in planning an ESP course in ecology and developing materials.
Mitić et al. (Fri,) studied this question.