The Effectiveness of Corpus-Based Approaches in Improving EFL Students’ Comprehension of Scientific Terminology in Nanotechnology

Appropriate use of scientific terminology is a critical skill for upper class members in the reading and writing of research articles. The current study examines the scientific vocabulary of senior students, specifically their comprehension of terminology, by employing a corpus-based approach at a specialized university in Uzbekistan.
A total of 154 articles from the PLOS ONE platform were selected to extract terms and terminological collocations in the field of nanotechnology. A Nano corpus was manually created to analyze the most frequently used words, with a focus on identifying the terms and collocations relevant to bionanotechnology. This information was then used to design grammatical and lexical-semantic activities to assess the comprehension of these terms among senior EFL students. The activities were delivered to 20 participants who specialized in chemical and agricultural engineering with an emphasis on biology over eight weeks. Following the completion of the activities, a paper-based questionnaire was circulated to gather students’ opinions on the effectiveness of the corpus methodology in improving their understanding of the terms.
The findings of the data analysis demonstrated the favorable impact of incorporating a corpusbased approach that encompassed grammar, lexical-semantic activities, and an effective understanding of field-specific vocabulary and terminology used in article patterns. The Sentence Pattern (SP) test was used to evaluate students’ comprehension of scientific terminology, which showed a significant improvement in their overall understanding of the bionanotechnology lexicon, terms, and collocations in reading abilities, while no significant difference was observed in their writing skills.
Research findings suggest that senior students’ participation in corpus-based classroom activities has a positive effect on their understanding of field-specific vocabulary and overall academic performance. Additional research could be conducted to enhance the research reading and writing skills of EFL senior students.