A semantic classification of nominal technical terms in secondary school biology textbooks.

ABSTRACT: Nominal technical terms (NTTs), as crucial builders for disciplinary knowledge, can cause difficulties for students. However, previous studies have rarely associated NTTs with disciplinary knowledge construction. Apart from that, scholars of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) have mainly focused on making wordlists for one specific discipline based on corpora rather than on meanings. Moreover, the current categorization of technical terms cannot reveal their role in constructing disciplinary knowledge. Against this backdrop, we carried out a corpus-based study to classify NTTs in secondary school biology textbooks and to unveil the knowledge constructed by different types of those NTTs. As a result, we found that NTTs in those textbooks could fall into five major categories: Thing, Activi

SUBMITTER: Le R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11554214 | biostudies-literature | 2024

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature