Table 1_From writing paragraphs to evaluating articles: academic vocabulary development in EFL health sciences students during the ChatGPT transition.docx

For English as a Foreign Language (EFL) health sciences students studying through English-medium instruction (EMI), this is a persistent challenge that affects their readiness for clinical practice, and AI writing tools have complicated it further since late 2022, as they can produce the academic English that writing courses spend years developing.

This study tracks academic vocabulary development across four trimesters, a period coinciding with the phased rollout of ChatGPT in Saudi Arabia.</p>Methods<p>The corpus-based analysis drew on 855,680 running words from the King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences Learner Corpus, produced by 157 female preparatory program students with Arabic as their first language. Academic Word List (AWL) coverage was computed for each trimester as the percentage of running words drawn from the 570 word families of the AWL, and compared against published benchmarks for medical academic texts.