A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF FINE ARTS ENGLISH VOCABULARY

บทคัดย่อ

The main purposes of the study were to 1) create a corpus-based learning list in which fine arts

vocabulary is ranked in order of frequency in authentic English; 2) provide sub-lists of painting, sculpture and

graphic arts in order to establish a fine arts learning list for learners in each subject area; 3) create a web site

based on the fine arts corpus-based learning list and 4) investigate the number of academic words in fine arts

texts. Nine fine arts instructors were relevance sampled and interviewed to gather suggestions concerning which

textbooks should be used to create the corpus. All textbooks suggested by the interviewees were purposively

sampled by considering their publication date and popularity. The texts were compiled to create a fine arts

corpus with three sub-corpora; painting, sculpture, and graphic arts. All corpora were analyzed by applying

the WordSmith Tools version 6. A total of 1,058,369 words were compiled in the fine arts corpus through this

research. Overall, 211 word families were revealed in the fine arts learning list, 91 word families in the painting

learning list, 121 word families in the sculpture learning list, and 76 word families in the graphic arts learning list.

All learning lists were applied by creating the Fine Arts Learning List Program which is available on-line at http://

www.fine-arts.dx.am. The program includes the Fine Arts Learning List Presenter, Fine Arts Learning List Definer

and Fine Arts Learning List Highlighter functions. Academic words were most frequently found in the graphic art

corpus (5.75% of all words in the texts). Considering painting, fine arts and sculpture corpora, the frequency of

academic words in the texts were 5.53, 5.26 and 4.91 percent, respectively.