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โครงการรวบรวมและจัดทําวารสารอิเล็กทรอนิกส์ มหาวิทยาลัยเกษตรศาสตร์

As shown in Table1, among f ve corpora of English for Engineering courses, the

GSL words had the highest coverage with around 80%. In conclusion, most part of any
text was comprised of words from the GSL. Accordingly, these words should receive at-

tention f rst because without these it is not possible to understand English without knowing
these words. High frequency words or general service words are worth spending time on

since they are found over and over in reading. Teachers may deal with these words by
pre-teaching them, putting the unknown words in an exercise after the text, or spending

time looking at the range of their meanings. Clearly, this group of words is very useful and
important for learners of English (Warning 2001).

However, 693 out of a total of 2,284 general service words were not found in the
study and these are some examples from absent GSL words.

ability accept brave childhood debt
abroad boast bravery chimney deceit

absence boundary charm choice deceive

absent bow chicken death decision

Regarding academic words, they accounted for 6% in each approximately. From

the study, the course materials for f rst and second year students from Thammasart University
gave the highest coverage by AWL words at 6.93% and 6.47% respectively. However, the

results did not meet Coxhead’s 10% coverage of academic texts. Moreover, the RU corpus
and RMUT corpus were found to have the smallest coverage of AWL. However, as for the

AWL comprising 570 word families, 693 of them never occurred in the study.

The examples of absent academic words are listed below

add immigrate analogy ideology

administrate implicate anticipate implicit

advocate incentive append inhibit
aggregate incline attribute insight

albeit inevitable attribute intrinsic

146 วารสารมนุษยศาสตร์ ปีที่ 18 ฉบับที่ 1 พ.ศ. 2554