A corpus-linguistic investigation of dental English

This article begins by presenting corpus linguistics and explaining how the corpus approach to language analysis can be used to investigate the language of dentistry. It then reports findings from an analysis that was carried out with readily available software and a corpus of 1,400 dental research abstracts. Included is information about word frequency in dental abstracts and also about how certain words tend to co-occur in sentences and form regular patterns. The article concludes with a discussion of ways that corpus-based findings can be applied to the teaching of English to non-native speakers of the language, many of whom will need English skills for their future careers in dentistry.