Lexical Patterns in Science and EST Textbooks

This study created several Science corpora and analyzed the lexical patterns, collocation and colligation of words. These corpora were based on the language used in both the upper secondary Science and the English for Science and Technology textbooks used then in Malaysia. The study looked at the similarities and differences between the lexico-grammatical patterns of scientific English and ‘everyday’ general English language. The study revealed a great variety of phrases, prepositions and phrasal verbs. It also found that even though some of the collocations in the Science corpus had predictable flexible combinations, many other collocations could not be easily predicted as they were arbitrarily blocked by usage, thus creating genre specific collocations. The study also showed that many of the words when in compound form often acquired extended meanings which were content specific thus, general English language grammar rules could not be applied to infer the meanings of these compound nouns. The creation of this Science corpus together with the work carried out in this study will be of great help to material writers and designers.