Development of English Musicology Word List

Abstract

The aim of this study was to collect the most frequent content words found in music and music education research articles, and create a list that was validated by music experts. The music and music education research article corpus was compiled from 300 articles published during January
2015 – February 2021 from nine international journals of SCOPUS and one expert-recommended journal. The music and music education research article corpus consists of 1,938,216 words. The list's word selection criteria were based on Coxhead's frequency criterion for Academic Word List. Every word family occurring 57 and more than 57 times were included in the word list. The AntWordProfiler (1.4.0) software was used to analyze the frequency of words and to generate the word list. The results revealed that 67.73 percent of the MWL’s words belonged to 1st 1,000 of GSL, 5.52 percent of words belonged to 2nd 1,000 of GSL, 10.31 percent were AWL, and the other 16.44 percent did not belong to
previous word lists. There are 516 high frequency content words after excluded function words, proper names, and meaningless words. Following that, three musicologists were asked to justify the words in the musicology word frequency list. After the justification process, 378 terms (72.87%) were deleted from the list, which was then classified into word families. The word list called the Musicology Word List (MWL) was generated. The MWL aims to provide key terms for reading research papers to music students and people who are interested in music in their preparation for musicology-related disciplines. MWL can also be used in vocabulary pedagogy to help music teachers choose appropriate
vocabulary to educate students.