Keyword Analysis: A Case Study of Research Trends in the English for Specific Purposes Journal Abstracts

Abstract

The advents of globalization and trans-border education have been catalyzing changes in research trends. The goal of this paper is to examine the main clusters of topics presented in the abstracts of ESP Journal in two times settings. A total of 89 abstracts published from 1986 to 1987 and 2015-2016, were collected and taken as the node corpus data. Using the corpus linguistics software AntCone (Anthony, 2017), the collected abstracts were analyzed to identify the absolute frequencies of words. The two sets of data were compared to examine similarities and differences in trends, and the relative frequencies of the obtained keywords were expressed as log-likelihood values, and the words with high log-likelihood values are considered keywords. The keywords are compared against the topics presented on the website of the journal to identify the ESP research trends as presented on the English for Specific Purpose Journal.