Compilation of a List of Technical Collocations for International Students In Science and Engineering

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The purpose of this study was to compile, for the reference of international students receiving specialized training in science or engineering in Japanese, a list of essential technical terms as contained in collocations, complete with their usage. "Technical collocation" means a grouping of words, such as onpa ga tsutawaru ("sound waves are transmitted"), that consists of technical vocabulary in combination with ordinary vocabulary, that as a phrase expresses a specialized concept, and that therefore needs to be defined as atechnical usage.First, technical terms were selected as raw material for a survey of technical collocations. The indices of all 118 2002 editions of the high school textbooks for the courses Physics IB, Physics II, Chemistry IB. Chemistry II, Mathematics I, Mathematics II, and Mathematics III were consulted as source material ; terms listed in the indices of half or more of the textbooks for a particular subject were then selected for the survey. Roughly one quarte … More r of the total technical vocabulary used in each of the three subjects was earmarked for further investigation.・Physics : 434 terms out of 1739・Chemistry : 739 terms out of 2673・Mathematics : 174 terms out of 771Next, a survey was conducted to identify technical collocations containing the technical terms in question. Sample sentences containing these terms were excerpted from the text data of the above textbooks ; an analytical program was then used to isolate technical collocations, such as onpa ga kikoeru ("sound waves can be heard"). If a collocation appeared in two or more textbooks, three experts in each of the subjects were asked to rule on whether it constituted a technical collocation. These experts were unanimous in ruling as collocations 3520 word groupings containing a total of 803 technical terms in the three subjects of physics, chemistry, and mathematics, the breakdown being as follows :Physics : 1152 collocations (containing 243 terms) out of 2718Chemistry : 1824 collocations (containing 429 terms) out of 4304Mathematics : 544 collocations (containing 131 terms) out of 1052 Less