Introduction:
Technically, mechanical engineering is the application of the principles and problem-solving techniques of engineering from design to manufacturing to the marketplace for any object. Mechanical engineering combines creativity, knowledge and analytical tools to accomplish the difficult task of turning an idea into reality. We all know that technology is for everyone, and how much we want countries to share the power of technology for the benefit of people all over the world. We also should be aware that educating a widely spoken language will connect people and will make the mechanical engineering society a better place. Therefore, the purpose of this research was to find and summarize the most recent academic conventions in the academic mechanical engineering society.
English, as the most widely spoken language, has 753 million non-native speakers, and the number keeps increasing. Proper and efficient communication will help the world, or the development of technology, run more quickly. I think it is necessary to complete this project. Sorting out some communication rules and some necessary vocabulary in the academic system of mechanical engineering can greatly help engineers who are new to English complete the basics of communication.
This research project will focus on answering these following four questions. Each of these questions will help the non-native engineers know how to begin their first step in English learning, especially in the mechanical engineering field. The first question is: What are the top-10 most frequently used academic mechanical engineering words and verbs in selected journal articles? The Second question is: What are the common phrases used in the corpus? The third question is: What are the top five Engineering-related technical words which were commonly used in selected articles.The last question is: What are the percentages of AWL, GSL first 1000 words, and second 1000 words selected journal articles? According to Averil Coxhead, Massey University, The Academic Word List (AWL) is a list of 570 word families that are commonly found in academic texts. (Coxhead) The General Service List (GSL) is a list of roughly 2,000 words published by Michael West in 1953. (West) The words in GSL were selected to represent the most frequent words of English and were taken from a corpus of written English. Aiding the research on the third question, a special word list is going to be used which refer to a website called MyVocabulary (MyVocabulary.com), there are 157 commonly used Engineering-related words.
For each of the questions, the following are expected results regarding each question before the analysis of the corpus was conducted. To the first question, the result is expected to be some commonly used physical quantities such as acceleration, velocity, distance, force, energy, and so on, which are very widely used. This is because many studies and analyses dissect complex problems down to the most basic physics, i.e., the SI system. For the second question, an ideal answer would be some common mechanical engineering writing terms, and some tangible components. The combination of these words reflects the complexity and
expertise involved in conducting mechanical engineering research. Regarding the third question, the physical concept words will be eliminated, and I think the high frequency words might be “rod”, or “motor”, which are the names of the parts. Because mechanical engineering is also a very hands-on discipline, often these journals will present the theory along with the flaws of today’s technology and how it can be improved. Considering the fourth issue, I think the content of AWL in mechanical engineering research articles will be higher and may even exceed the content of GSL. This is because in such articles, leaving aside the introductory chapter and the conclusion, there will be a large mathematical logic derivation, and once the English writing appears, it is a brief top-down or summary logic induction. Therefore, some AWL vocabulary will be used.
Method:
On this corpus project, procedures and the analyzing tool are essential to the result, so introducing them is necessary. AntConc, a freeware corpus analysis toolkit for concordancing and text analysis, will be used as the major facility to analyze the articles. AntConc was made by Laurence Anthony, Ph.D., Center for English Language Education in Science and Engineering, Waseda University. To prevent problems caused by iterations of AntConc versions, AntConc Windows (3.5.9) will be used in this study. And, this version of AntConc only supports FensiText files, so all articles will be converted to txt files for analysis. AntConc comes with a complete Youtube video tutorial for scholars to follow and learn from before proceeding with the analysis. A downloadable pdf guide is also available on Laurence Anthony’s website.
For the article selection phase, I chose articles from The journal Mechanical Sciences (MS). [Inclusion & Exclusion Criteria] The corpus is comprised of six articles from the 2020-2022
peer-reviewed mechanical engineering journal. Mechanical Sciences (MS). Considering the scope of this research and its purpose, the researcher decided to collect articles from this website. MS is “an international forum for the dissemination of original contributions in the field of theoretical and applied mechanics. Its main ambition is to provide a platform for young researchers to build up a portfolio of high-quality peer-reviewed journal articles.” (Sciences) The reason for choosing this platform is also related to the objectives of this platform, all aimed at young scholars. By choosing this platform, this research can better discover the characteristics of mechanical engineering communication. Next, the articles that will be analyzed will be listed by name. Six articles from MS were selected for this study and numbered from 1 to 6 in order.
The reason of picking these articles is that they are attracting, also, they have a relatively high click ratio, which means they are popular among the sea of mechanical engineering journals. For journal 4, this is the only journal published in 2022 before this project is started, which is the most recent journal. In order to ensure the rigor of the study, it is necessary to read the journals consistently and eliminate subjective descriptions before doing the study. For example, personal stories or passages of an autobiographical nature, such as the origin of the mechanical engineering research, are eliminated.
Before focusing on the four research questions, after the six articles are uploaded to AntConc, by using the Word List function, we can know that the number of word tokens for these six articles is 27250 and that there are 2840 word types.
Findings and discussions:
The first question is “What are the top-10 most frequently used academic mechanical engineering words and verbs in selected journal articles?” To find out the corresponding answer, the word list tool from AntConc is used. This tool is meant to display the frequency of
each word token. Since the research question is about academic words, words like “the”, “of”, “and”, “is” are eliminated. In the word list, the first engineering-related word is “rail”, which had a frequency of 290. The second word is “vibration” which occurred 258 times. Then, “system” appeared 199 times in total. The fifth place is “model”, which occurred 127 times. “Wheel” appeared 124 times, and took the eighth place. “Structure”, as a common engineering word, had a frequency of 116. “Support” appeared 116 times. “Analysis” has a frequency of 115. The tenth word is “corrugation”, which is a technical word to describe the shape as a series of parallel ridges and furrows, which appeared 104 times. Classifying these results, the ten words can be grouped into three categories. The first group is “parts and components” which includes “rail” and “wheel”. Parts and components are taking a lead in this ranking, we could find out that manufacturing components is essential to illustrate a mechanical engineering idea. The second group is “general concepts” and contains “system”, “analysis”, “model”, “support”, and “structure”. These words are common words in mechanical engineering studies. Scholars use these words to describe an abstract idea and use the “parts and components” to turn these ideas into reality. The third group is “technical words” such as “vibration” and “corrugation”. In the field of mechanical engineering, it is essential to recognize specific academic vocabulary. Vibration is also a physics quantity, which partially proves the expectation for the first question. However, the percentage of physics terms is not as high as expected. In contrast, the next physical quantity “frequency” appears only 93 times and then “speed” appears 91 times, ranking at 11th and 13th.
For answering “What are the common phrases used in the corpus?”, the Cluster/N-Gram tool should be used. By clicking the N-Grams tab and setting the size with a minimum of 2 and a
maximum of 3, AntConc will display the result. The top five phrases are “wheel rail”, “wheel corrugation”, “guide rail”, “surrounding rock”, and “support structure”. They appeared 97, 90, 69, 67 and 58 times respectively. The result fits the expectation very well. As predicted, since most of the communication and analysis in mechanical engineering is through the logical derivation of mathematics, some phrases are used around more tangible objects.
Moving on to the third question, “What are the top five Engineering-related technical words which were commonly used in selected articles?” As mentioned before, the Engineering-related words are referring to MyVocabulary.com. By using “Tool preferences” and the “Word list”, we could find out the result about the frequency and the corresponding answer for the question. The top five Engineering-related technical words are “vibration” with 276 occurrences, “analysis” with 145 occurrences, “structure” with 119 occurrences, “gear” with 99 occurrences, and “cantilever” with 79 occurrences. As expected, there are two practical parts and components in the list which are “gear” and “cantilever”. Also, 5.9% of word tokens are covered by this word list.
For the last question, “What are the percentages of AWL, GSL first 1000 words, and second 1000 words selected journal articles?” The “Tool Preferences” will be used to process the study. After opening those word list files, the word token number should be recorded. The word token for AWL is 2815, for GSL first 1000 words is 15965, and for GSL second 1000 words is 2337. By calculating the percentage, the results are 10.33%, 58.58%, 8.57% respectively.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, while some academic vocabulary that is commonly used to write papers dominates, such as the conclusions we draw from our first research question, we need to focus
more on some nouns specific to the mechanical engineering profession. These peculiar nouns play a great role in the essay, such as the “parts and components”. Also, as the result from the second and third questions, the frequency of specialized vocabulary about high difficulty is not very high. Combined with the research paper in the fourth question, we learn that in fact the percentage of GSL is relatively high in mechanical engineering journals. This is because a large part of the mechanical engineering dissertation is devoted to the derivation of formulas or the analysis of diagrams, so most of the text is not particularly difficult to understand and extremely professional.
It is also worth noting that in mechanical engineering journals, if the journal is devoted to a topic, the frequency of the terminology specific to that topic becomes very high. For example, the word “rail” appears in the first research question because Report 2 and Report 4 are both research tracks, resulting in a very high frequency of the word “rail”. The limited sample size in this case led to this result. Because there are many branches of mechanical engineering, it is too tedious to learn the vocabulary of one subject at a time. Nonnative speakers should attempt to learn words from a specific field of mechanical engineering before trying analyze any papers.
Evaluating the third and the fourth question, it is easy to say that Mechanical engineering articles do not require a great deal of specialized vocabulary. The vocabulary of the article is mainly focused on the topic. For example, in an article on orbital motion, there is a large number of corresponding vocabularies. Therefore, it is not necessary to master all the vocabulary as in economics, but rather to master this specific branch of vocabulary to complete most of the reading comprehension.
Further evaluating the conclusion and the result, the researcher thinks there is still a long way to go to popularize basic English vocabulary for engineers. Since the subject of mechanical engineering involves all aspects of human beings and new terms will be created continuously due to the progress of technology, I think such work should be carried out. Even though the sample size of this study was very limited, it verified many conjectures and hypotheses of the researcher, so it was a very successful project. This project is very meaningful and I hope that the human technological society can be more harmonious.
| Comments | From | Revision |
| Shorten the title | Esther Elias | Title was shortened from 15 words to 11 words. |
| Shorten the summary and separate | Esther Elias | Summary was rephrased |
| Link the summary back to the result. | Professor Kang | Another paragraph focusing on the research questions is added. Improved the entire message. |
| Adding page numbers | Professor Kang | Page number notes are added. |
| Expectations are repetitive and hard to read | Professor Kang | Expectations are rephrased and organized. |
| Messy introduction on the selected journals | Matthew Pinsley | A table is added to make the list of journals clear and easy to read.
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