Academic Words in Discourse News: A Corpus Based Study Of Pakistani English Newspaper

Abstract

This study addressed two research questions regarding academic words used in the Corpus of Pakistani English Newspaper Articles (COPENA).Firstly it asked about the frequently used words in the corpus of Pakistani English Newspaper, Secondly it was asked, to what extent authors or editor use Academic words in newspaper as compared with Coxhead 570 (AWL). Total corpus was 414435 running words taken from online Newspaper; E. dawn and The Nation. The computer software ANTCONC was used to find out the frequency and percentage of words frequently occurred in COPENA. Another tool WORDSMITH was used to find out the frequency of AWL (Academic word list) in COPENA. The result revealed that words in the AWL covered 2.58% of the total words in the corpus, and frequency and percentage of words in COPENA are clearly presented in the table. It was also revealed from the result that almost all the AWL is present in COPENA with high frequency. So the result indicated that newspaper articles might be highly beneficial for learning a language and academic achievement.