At the University of Hertfordshire we have several courses with the objective of preparing international students for entry to degree courses at British universities. We have been involved with two of these: The UH International Foundation Programme for undergraduate students and the UH International Bridging Programme for postgraduate students.
They are both one year courses, consisting of two semesters. In semester A, we have 16 hours per week of English, out of a total of 21 class contact hours. In semester B, we have 6 hours per week, out of a total of 18. In semester A this year the 16 hours was divided into 4 three-hour sessiona and 2 two-hour sessions.
Most of the students were from China and the main subjects they plan to study are business and computer science, but there are many other courses such as environmental science and law. The minimum entry levels are IELTS 4.5 (or equivalent) for the Foundation programme and IELTS 5 (or equivalent) for the Bridging Programme. This year (2002-2003) we had 110 Foundation students in 8 English groups and 95 Bridging students in 7 groups. They were taught by 4 permanent members of teaching staff and around 20 hourly paid members of staff.
One question we ask every year is "What do we do in these 16 hours". And, more importantly, how do we systematise it so it can work with 15 groups of 16 hours per week and 25 lecturers. It therefore changes a little every year. This year we decided:
The listening and reading classes were 2 hours as it was felt that they would need to do more self-study in these areas. We had had optional vocabulary courses in the past, but this was the first year we had made it compulsory. Not all the lecturers agreed agreed with the vocabulary module. Everyone agreed that vocabulary was very important, but some lecturers thought that it should be integrated into the other courses, not taught on its own. However, we decided that, although vocabulary would be learned and taught in all the other courses, it was important enough to have a course of its own.
So once we had decided to include a vocabulary course, it was necessary to decide which vocabulary to focus on? Nation (2001, p. 11) distinguishes 4 categories of vocabulary:
In 1953 Michael West (West, 1953) published his well-known General Service List of English words. This was a list of the 2000 most useful word families of English. Although the list has been criticised for many reasons, research into academic texts by Averil Coxhead (Coxhead, 2000) has shown that the General Service List (GSL) covers up to 76% of the academic texts she studied. It would seem essential for any EAP student to know these word families. We hoped they knew these high-frequency words and did not plan to explicitly focus on them. It would be useful, though, in the future to check this.
Coxhead (1998) studied over 3.5 million words of academic text and identified another 570 word families that were commonly used in academic texts from all subjects. Her words cover 10% of the academic texts she studied. She called these words the Academic Word List (AWL). It would also seem necessary for any EAP student to know these words also. We thought they probably wouldn't know them so we should teach them. But again it would be useful, though, in the future to check this. So we decided we should focus on the academic words, either Coxhead's AWL or Nation's older University Word List (Xue & Nation, 1984).
Therefore the General Service List plus the Academic Word List cover 86% of academic texts. As well as these high-frequency and general academic words, EAP students would also need to know some of the less frequent words used in English (low-frequency words) and the specific words related to their subjects (technical words) so we thought it would be important to help students to learn some of the specific words related to their subjects. As I said, most of our students are business and computer science, but we do have many students studying other subjects. Handling this is difficult. We can try to teach some of the words, but more importantly, we have to help the students learn words themselves and deal with unfamiliar words when they meet them. So vocabulary learning skills and strategies are important skills to learn, as well as word building. To this we added an introduction to what it means to learn a word, and we have five components.
We also thought that it was essential to contextualise these words as much as possible so we called the course Vocabulary/Integrated skills to emphasise to the students that they would spend some time reading/writing/speaking/listening with a focus on vocabulary.
Some lecturers were a little worried about how to spend 3 hours on vocabulary and my suggestion was something like:
So we planned the course and came up with the specifications. But I did not teach it at all. It was taught by 10 different lecturers so I'd now like to hand you over to 3 of the lecturers who did teach the course so they can reflect on how they got on with it, trying to put it into practice.
Coxhead, A. (1998). An academic word list. (English Language Institute Occasional Publication Number 18). Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington.
Coxhead, A. (2000). A new academic word list. TESOL Quarterly, 34, 213-238.
Nation, I. S. P. (1990). Teaching and learning vocabulary. Boston, MA: Heinle & Heinle.
Nation, I. S. P. (2001). Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Porter, D. (2001). Check your vocabulary for academic English. London: Peter Collin Publishing.
West, M. (1953). A general service list of English words. London: Longmans.
Xue, G. Y. & Nation, I. S. P. (1984). A university word list. Language Learning and Communication, 3, 215-229.