In my presentation I described a materials development project which arose from a concern that I was not giving a satisfactory response to an important question from my pre-sessional students. For students on EAP programmes, rapid vocabulary expansion is one of the keys to success in their future departments. For this reason, I had stressed to my students the importance of learning general academic vocabulary at their stage (first half of a 6-month pre-sessional) but they did not have the means of determining which words came into this category. Their only recourse was to ask me for guidance; my intuitive response was based on my own academic experience in the humanities. This type of response was unsatisfactory: I was possibly not providing appropriate guidance to the scientists and engineers in my mixed discipline classes and I was certainly not enabling my students to work independently. The Academic Word List (Coxhead 2000) provided me with a starting point for a new approach to supporting my students’ vocabulary development in that it identifies clearly the important academic words which occur commonly across disciplines.
The AWL was created from a corpus of written academic texts. After discounting the first 2000 most frequent words, the criteria of frequency and range were used to select commonly occurring academic words. The result is a list of 570 headwords each representing a word family. The list is divided into 10 sublists, with Sublist 1 containing the most frequent words e.g. analyse, benefit, principle and Sublist 10 the least frequent e.g. integrity, persistent, undergo. More information on the AWL can be found at Coxhead’s website at: http://www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/div1/awl. An important factor in my decision to develop materials using the AWL was that it provides a useful extension to the basic vocabulary of English for EAP students irrespective of their field of study. In fact, for all EAP students it is a kind of high frequency vocabulary.
The materials I developed to support vocabulary expansion are based on the ideas of Nation (2001). He suggests that three processes are necessary for the successful learning of vocabulary: noticing, retrieving and generating.
A very simple way to foster noticing of target vocabulary is just to highlight it in a text. So I produced copies of articles we were studying with the words from the AWL in bold. Doing this by hand was time-consuming and tedious, so, with the help of Nottingham University’s CAL group, I designed a computer program, the AWL Highlighter, which can be found at: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~alzsh3/acvocab/awlhighlighter.htm. Using the Highlighter it is possible to type or paste in a text and quickly process it to show all the academic words in bold. This simple step, accompanied by an explanation, gives students principled guidance over which vocabulary items to spend their time on as well as encouraging noticing of the target vocabulary within its context. This in itself supports and enhances their vocabulary study.
My next step was to produce a number of vocabulary worksheets focussed on one of the word families from the AWL. The purpose of these was to encourage students to look long and hard at some of the words, using a deeper level of processing than they might otherwise do, in order to facilitate learning. In addition I wanted to provide a model of how to engage with an item of vocabulary so as to begin learning how to use the word accurately and appropriately. I particularly wanted to encourage students to pay attention to collocations and to commonly occurring phrases. To meet these aims I based my worksheets on sets of concordance lines. Studying concordance lines allows the students to meet a word in many different brief contexts which helps them to build up a sense of its meaning. It also enables the students to become aware of typical patterns of use and to pick up on the frequently occurring lexico-grammatical phrases which will be useful to them. To minimise the difficulties my intermediate students faced in approaching the study of concordance lines I selected and adapted to make them more accessible, whilst ensuring that the set remained, if not entirely authentic, representative of major features. For guidance I provide questions which direct students to look for these features. These exercises are designed to foster noticing, not only of the words themselves as in the adapted texts, but of the way the words combine with others in typical patterns.
For example a set of concordance lines for the target word factor allows students to notice how in one typical pattern it is frequently followed by the preposition in and preceded by a group of adjectives indicating degree of significance, as in:
The weight of portables is a key factor in attracting customers.
Once the students have studied the concordance lines, noticed certain features and arrived at an understanding of how the target word is actually used, productive generative use is encouraged through the use of prompts to elicit short pieces of writing.
In order to provide a context where it is necessary for students to retrieve a word from their memory, thus strengthening learning, I have focussed on gap fill activities.
With the AWL Gapmaker program, available at: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~alzsh3/acvocab/awlgapmaker.htm academic vocabulary can be easily recycled. A summary of the original text, or an extract, can be typed or pasted into the program and the words from the AWL will be replaced by a gap.
The program allows for differentiation between the sublists and includes as an option a list of the extracted words, which allows for fairly subtle grading of the gapfill activities.
Using the materials described here I have developed the following procedure:
This principled approach to vocabulary teaching focuses on items which represent core vocabulary for all EAP students, thus supporting and facilitating their vocabulary development, in terms of both breadth and depth. It is important to be explicit about the theory behind the materials so that as the students become familiar with the materials and more confident in their vocabulary learning strategies they are able to transfer the skills learnt and practised in class to their independent study. To support this, I have created a website about academic vocabulary for students, available at: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~alzsh3/acvocab/index.htm. The website includes advice and information, word lists and examples of highlighted texts. Students can access for themselves the AWL Highlighter in order to identify academic words in texts of their choice. They can also use the AWL Gapmaker to create their own vocabulary review tests.
As a result of this materials development project I am now in a stronger position to guide my students and provide them with suitable materials as they study to expand their vocabulary in preparation for their future courses. The response from the students has been favourable: all appreciate the guidance provided by the highlighted texts. Some, I know, are making use of the website in their independent study.
The website, including the two programs, is available to anyone who would like to visit it, including, of course, teachers who want to create their own materials focussing on academic vocabulary development.
To look at the website and try the programs developed by Sandra Haywood go to: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~alzsh3/acvocab/
To see the Academic Word List in all its forms (headwords, full lists, sublists) go to Averil Coxhead’s website at: http://www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/div1/awl/
Coxhead, A. 2000. A New Academic Word List. TESOL Quarterly 34:2
Nation, I.S.P. 2001. Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. Cambridge: CUP