English For Engineering Education: A Corpus Study of Lexicogrammatical Contents Of Engineering Textbooks

Purpose: The need for English usage for Specific Purposes (ESP) in technical institutions has recently gained prominence. Specifically, the study identifies (1) the most frequently used vocabulary (with at least 100 hits) of electrical engineering texts and (2) their collocations in context. Design/Methodology/Approach: As a corpus-based English for Academic Purposes (EAP) enquiry, the AntConc corpus analytical tool was employed to analyse the data. The data include seven undergraduate Electrical Engineering textbooks easily accessible online with renowned authorship purposively sampled. Findings: The study's results reveal key vocabulary items in the Electrical Engineering textbooks, including current, electric, voltage, field, circuit, magnetic, and power in the order of frequency from the highest. These form beneficial syntagmatic relations with themselves and other content words; current collocates most frequently with voltage, typically in ‘voltage and current’ (59 hits) against ‘current and voltage’ (23 hits) structure. Research Limitations: These results have implications for existing scholarship on Electrical Engineering education and for further research in English for Academic Purposes. Practical Implication: This study has a practical implication for developing course contents and pedagogy for English Language or Communicative Skills for Electrical Engineering students and for the teachers in teaching some of these frequently used words to broaden the vocabulary scope of the Engineering students. Social Implication: The study will help inform policy-making in technical education to address the linguistic gap by providing a framework for including English for Specific Purposes in all curricula of technical universities. Originality: This study is based on the design of needs analysis in English for specific purposes: efficiently implementing impending competency-based training (CBT) for technical education in Ghana.