The present study was an attempt to develop, evaluate, and validate a corpus made from six main hard sciences fields, namely Energy Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanic Engineering, Computer Sciences, Chemistry and Physics. To analyze the data, a web application was developed by the researchers.
The results of the analyses showed that the Hard Sciences Corpus developed by the researchers of the present study has the highest coverage of AWL and GSL among all the previous corpora, which makes it a more valid corpus. Another distinctive feature of the Hard Sciences Corpus was that it was made up of only Research Articles. The corpus will have the following applications: The researchers will develop the web-application so that it can calculate the concordance of any given piece of text with any of the sub-corpora or the total corpus. The concordance calculation can be very helpful in ESP writing courses from two points: first, the concordance system can be used by the students to evaluate their own writing and second, teachers can use the system as a grading tool for their students‟ compositions. Furthermore, the Corpus can be used by the journal editors to check the received articles for publication for their proximity to the academic writing styles of the field.
The researchers suggest the following topics for further research: a. What Non-AWL content words are frequent in the corpus? The exploration of the above question can lead to a hard sciences word list which contains the word families other than the ones in AWL and also GSL. The study can be replicated for soft sciences and the results can be compared. Hoever, there were certain limitations to the study which need to be considered in the use of the findings. The researchers included only six of the majors in hard sciences, and for future further studies the number of the sub-corpora can be extended to include more fields in hard sciences.