研究指出，工學院學生認為字彙量不足是閱讀原文教科書時最大的障礙，而原文書又是大學求學階段最主要的閱讀教材，若無法掌握書中內容，將有礙專業能力的發展。因此，本研究欲(1)找出工學院學生在閱讀原文書時，必須要認識的單字，並建立一份工學院原文教科書常用字彙表；(2)瞭解工學院大一大二學生對此字彙表中不同類別字彙（一般、學術、專業、補充）習得之情形。藉此我們可以知道學生所具備的單字量，並針對不足的部分施予必要的協助。結果顯示：整體而言學生對於字表的認知達到60%；對於各類型單字的認知為80%一般、60%學術、47%補充、以及40%專業；大二學生的字彙認知多於大一，主要在於專業和補充單字的表現上，而不是一般以及學術字彙。

Textbooks play a major role in learning. It therefore follows that a lack of required vocabulary amongst university students may lead to inadequate reading comprehension thus directly influence the development of their professional knowledge. In order to help engineering students expand their vocabularies to a satisfactory level, this study was undertaken to investigate the level of vocabulary knowledge required for successful textbook comprehension. A corpus, including 10 commonly used textbooks in the School of Engineering, was compiled as an instrument. 3,941 required words were then selected to create a Fundamental Engineering wordlist (FEW). The FEW was further divided into general service, academic, technical, and supplementary word categories. A vocabulary test was carried out amongst 124 engineering students to measure their receptive knowledge of the vocabulary on the list. The results of the study revealed that (1) students recognized 60% of the words on the FEW; (2) in terms of the word categories, the participants were able to recognize 80% of general service words, 60% of academic words, 47% of the supplementary and 40% of the technical words, and (3) the main difference between freshmen and sophomores lay in their knowledge of the subject-related vocabularies (supplementary and technical), rather than that of the non-subject-related vocabularies (academic and general service).