What kinds of words make up a technical vocabulary?
• How important is technical vocabulary in specialised texts? • How can learners be helped to cope with technical vocabulary? Words were classified as being technical or non-technical words by rating them on a four point scale designed to measure the strength of the relationship of a word to a particular specialised field. The scale used to do this is in Table 1, which has the scale for the anatomy vocabulary. The applied linguistics scale was essentially the same with different examples and suggested areas. Items classified at steps 3 and 4 were considered to be technical words. Items at steps 1 and 2 were not. Table 1: A rating scale for finding technical words (as applied to the anatomy text) Step 1 Words such as function words that have a meaning that has no particular relationship with the field of anatomy, that is, words independent of the subject matter. Examples are: the, is, between, it, by, 12, adjacent, amounts, common, commonly, directly, constantly, early, and especially.
