Students’ Use of Academic Vocabulary in Essay-based Exams in the Subject of Applied Linguistics

Abstract

This study investigated Master One students’ difficulties in using academic vocabulary in essay-based exams in the subject of Applied Linguistics. The aim of the present study was two-fold: determining the difficulties encountered by students in using individual academic vocabulary items as well as investigating the problems faced by the same learners in using this type of items at the discourse level. To achieve these two aims, a corpus analysis of thirty randomly selected essay-based exam papers written by a sample of Master One students of English at Mohammed Seddik Ben Yahya University, Jijel, was conducted. The collected essays were codified and analysed based on Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List and Xodabande et al.’s (2022) Academic Vocabulary in Applied Linguistics List. Moreover, the Compleat Lexical Tutor software was used to profile subjects’ general academic vocabulary