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Vocabulary and EAP

Saturday 15th February 2003

CELTE, University of Warwick

Organiser: Hilary Nesi

Abstracts

Richard Cauldwell (Speechinaction)
Vocabulary in the acoustic blur of speech - the problems for listening.
Learners report that words they supposedly know become unrecognisable in speech. In this talk I shall explain the variety of soundshapes that words can have. I shall also demonstrate materials designed and recently published which can help advanced learners handle this wide variety of soundshapes in listening.

David Oakey (University of Birmingham)
Identifying frequent word combinations for students of Economics
In addition to learning the specialist vocabulary of their academic discipline, my EAP students also have difficulty with lengthy, unfamiliar combinations of familiar words. This talk examines how the computer-aided analysis of multi-word items in an Economics journal article can be used to improve students' handling of complex noun groups.

Sandra Haywood (University of Nottingham)
Making effective use of the Academic Word List
How can the Academic Word List be used to support effective learning of core academic vocabulary? My talk will describe a materials development project involving the design of text processing software and a range of exercise types to respond to this question. Examples of processed texts and exercises will be available.
Report

Jim Milton (University of Wales, Swansea)
Lexical profiling and learning strategies
The link between frequency and the learnability of lexis in an L2 is accepted. This link need not be a simple one, however, and the different strategies which learners bring to the learning process may result in a range of possible lexical frequency profiles. This paper will examine the possible profiles which different learning strategies may produce and then investigate their occurrence in a sample of 227 learner profiles drawn from a language school in Greece. A variety of distinct profiles do appear to exist and may be associated with different degrees of success of L2 learning.

James Binchy (University of Limerick)
Undergraduate essays - does vocabulary influence grade?
Most third-level undergraduate students are required to write essays as a form of assessment. In these essays, it could be argued that the students are expected by those correcting the essay to adhere to certain language norms as well as to display appropriate knowledge. In disciplines of study of which students have no prior academic experience, of which, in Ireland, Philosophy is one, they have no discourse expectations, even at a lexical level, when they begin the course in first year. With time, as the students are exposed to lectures, tutorials, readings and lecture handouts, they develop some discourse expectations and use these when producing their own writing for assessment. However, not all students adhere to the language norms they have should have intuited from their interaction within the discipline. Some may argue that the failure to replicate the appropriate language norms results in a lower grade.
This paper uses a corpus of 60 first-year undergraduate Philosophy essays collected over two semesters to investigate whether there are vocabulary differences between those essays which receive higher grades and those which receive lower grades. The implications of these findings for EAP pedagogy will also be examined.

Colin Campbell & Paul Thompson (University of Reading)
Developing a ‘Vocabulary for EAP’ course
In this paper we will report on an ongoing ‘Vocabulary for EAP’ project which involves both research and materials production. In designing the vocabulary component for an EAP Pre-sessional course, the following questions need to be addressed:
  • Which words to teach?
  • What to teach about them?
  • How to teach them?
  • How to present the vocabulary?
To help us answer the first two questions, we have compiled a corpus of learner writing, collected from students on the Pre-sessional Programme at Reading, and a corpus of the teaching materials used on the programme. We have also drawn on the Academic Word List (Coxhead 2000). We will report on the findings of our uses of these corpora.
In this talk, we will also explain the rationale that we developed for the design of EAP vocabulary materials, and we will present samples of the materials that we have produced, both in order to make the rationale clearer, and to invite participants to assist in trialling the materials.

Paul Fanning (University of Middlesex)
Syntax as a Source of EAP Lexis
Eugene Winter, in elaborating "three vocabularies" of clausal coherence marking, was one of the first to explore semantic equivalences of syntax and lexis. Given the relevance of this particular equivalence to EAP, it seems to be worth seeking out other syntax-lexis equivalences. The talk will present a range of these, assess their usefulness to EAP, and show how they can be used for the production of new vocabulary materials.
Report

Richard Haill (Oxford Brookes University) & Hilary Nesi (University of Warwick)
A study of dictionary use by international students
This paper reports on a study to investigate the dictionary-using habits of international students studying at Oxford Brookes University. Over a period of three years, six groups of students were set assignments requiring them to report on the way they had consulted dictionaries to look up unknown words in texts of their choice. These assignments were analysed to reveal subjects’ choices of reading material, look-up words and dictionaries. The data revealed that whilst the majority of words were looked up successfully, more than half of the students had at least one problem with dictionary consultation. Some of these problems resulted in serious (although often amusing) errors of interpretation, but the students were found to be largely unaware of the fact that they had misread the dictionary entries. In the paper we will review the kinds of words the students looked up and the types of problem they encountered.

Clare Anderson, Andy Gillett, Mary Martala & Jayne Wright (University of Hertfordshire)
An EAP vocabulary module on a foundation course?
At the beginning of this academic year, we decided to include a vocabulary module of 3 hours per week, out of 16, for one semester of our one year international foundation (undergraduate) and bridging (postgraduate) programmes. This session will start with a short introduction to the course and some background by Andy who designed and organised the course. This will be followed by short reflections on aspects of teaching the module by Clare, Mary and Jayne, three of the lecturers who taught the course. We will then open the session up to questions to the presenters and general discussion about whether or not it is useful to devote one module of a course to vocabulary.
Reports: Introduction - Andy Gillett; Clare Anderson; Mary Martala; Jayne Wright

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