Higher level learners and vocabulary acquisition

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Higher level learners and vocabulary acquisition
41st IATEFL ConferenceAberdeen, 1822 April 2007

• Ülle Türk
• ulle.turk_at_ut.ee

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Topics discussed

• Background
• Problem
• Tools used
• VocabProfile
• Academic Word List
• The study and its findings
• How to use the findings

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Background

• First year university students specialising in
  English language and literature
• Competence in English C1 and above
• CEFR self-assessment grid
• Oxford Placement Test
• One-semester (2 CP 3 ECTS) academic writing
  course
• Grammar well controlled problems with vocabulary

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Problem

• How to motivate students to work on improving
  their vocabulary?
• How to personalise and guide their vocabulary
  learning?

Possible solution

• Making use of VocabProfile and Academic Word List

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VocabProfile

• Vocabprofile a computer programme designed to
  allow teachers to analyse their own texts and to
  classify the words in them on the basis of the
  frequency with which such items appear in very
  large text corpora
• VP English v. 2.6
• based on Laufer and Nations Lexical Frequency
  Profiler
• adapted for Web by Tom Cobb
• available on his web page The Compleat Lexical
  Tutor http//www.lextutor.ca

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VocabProfile

• divides words of any text into four categories by
  frequency
• the most frequent 1000 words of English (K1)
• the second most frequent thousand words of
  English, i.e. 1001 to 2000 (K2)
• academic words
• the remainder or off-list words
• provides the percentages but also words
  themselves.

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Rationale

• a small number of words makes up a large part of
  the texts we read
• Vocabulary size and text coverage in the Brown
  corpus (over 1,000,000 running words made up of
  500 texts) (Francis and Kucera 1982, cited in
  Nation 2001 15 )

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Word frequency and text coverage
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A text assuming schema knowledge of New Zealand
forestry

• knowing 80 percent of the words in a text
• If _____ planting rates are _____ with planting
  _____ satisfied in each _____ and the forests
  milled at the _____ opportunity, the _____ wood
  supplies could further _____ to about 36 million
  cubic meters _____ in the period 20012015.
  (Adapted from Nation, 1990 242.)

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• 90 percent of context words known
• If _____ planting rates are maintained with
  planting targets satisfied in each _____ and the
  forests milled at the earliest opportunity, the
  _____ wood supplies could further _____ to about
  36 million cubic meters annually in the period
  20012015.
• 95 percent of the context words known
• If current planting rates are maintained with
  planting targets satisfied in each _____ and the
  forests milled at the earliest opportunity, the
  available wood supplies could further _____ to
  about 36 million cubic meters annually in the
  period 20012015.

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Academic word lists

• the American University Word List (Praninskas
  1972) 507 word families
• University Word List (UWL) (Xue and Nation 1984)
  808 word families, divided into 11 levels
• Academic Word List (AWL) (Averil Coxhead 2000)
  570 word families
• divided into 10 sublists with 60 word families
  each (sublist 10 30 word families)
• accounts for about 10 percent of running words in
  an academic texts

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GSL AWL and text coverage
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The study

• 17 students
• Final essay of about 700 words on a topic of
  students own choice
• Mean length 816 words (636 1271)
• Mean percentage of
• K1 80 (72 86) (NS 70)
• K2 5 (7 3) (NS 10)
• AWL 5 (2 10) (NS 10)
• Off-list 10 (5 15) (NS 10)

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(No Transcript)
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• Family Listfamily_number of tokens
• AWL families 6271118 acquire_1 adapt_1
  affect_1 area_1 attach_1 comment_1
  communicate_2 concentrate_1 conduct_1
  conflict_7 constant_1 cooperate_1
  create_1 culture_4 derive_1 distinct_1
  document_1 economy_4 environment_2
  establish_1 ethnic_3 eventual_1 factor_1
  final_1 foundation_3 fund_1 fundamental_1
  furthermore_1 generation_3 identify_1
  ideology_2 immigrate_1 indicate_1
  individual_1 institute_2 integrate_22
  intense_1 internal_1 interpret_1
  involve_2 isolate_1 issue_4 job_2
  legal_3 major_1 ministry_1 minor_1
  normal_1 occur_2 participate_1 percent_2
  policy_1 process_3 project_2 region_2
  rely_1 require_1 restore_1 structure_1
  survey_1 thereby_1 violate_1

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• Token List
• Sublist 1areas create derived economic economic
  economic economy environment environment
  established factors identity indicates individual
  interpreted involved involved issue issues issues
  issues legal legal legal majority occur occur
  percentage percentage policy process process
  process required structure
• Sublist 2acquire affected conduct cultural
  cultural culture culture distinction finally
  institution institutions normal participate
  regional regions survey
• Sublist 3comment constantly document funding
  immigrate minorities rely

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• Sublist 4communicative communicative concentrate
  ethnic ethnic ethnic integrate integrated
  integration integration integration integration
  integration integration integration integration
  integration integration integration integration
  integration integration integration integration
  integration integration integration integration
  internal job job project project
• Sublist 5conflict conflict conflict conflicts
  conflicts conflicts conflicts fundamental
  generation generation generations
• Sublist 6attachments cooperation furthermore
  ministry
• Sublist 7adapt foundation foundation foundation
  ideological ideological isolation
• Sublist 8eventually intense restored thereby
• Sublist 9violation

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AWL words

• AWL families represented in student writing
• Families 272
• Types 398
• Tokens 711
• 117 families represented by only one token
• 25 families represented by 5 or more tokens

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Sublist coverage

• Sublist One 51
• Sublist Two 40
• Sublist Three 33
• Sublist Four 32
• Sublist Five 21

• Sublist Six 27
• Sublist Seven 28
• Sublist Eight 19
• Sublist Nine 13
• Sublist Ten 5

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How to use the information?

• Using AWL to plan vocabulary learning
• Collaboratively
• Individually
• Work from list to list
• Look at whole entries, not headwords alone
• Study dictionaries or concordance lines to see
  how the word is used
• Try to find a place for the word in own writing

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Tools

• The Academic Word List http//www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/
  research/awl/index.html
• The AWL Highlighter http//www.nottingham.ac.uk/
  alzsh3/acvocab/awlhighlighter.htm
• The Compleat Lexical Tutor http//www.lextutor.ca
  
• Corpus Concordance Sampler http//www.collins.co.
  uk/Corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx
• Longman Exams Dictionary. 2006.

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References

• Cobb, T. M. Horst. 2000. Vocabulary sizes of
  some City University students. City University
  (HK) Journal of Language Studies, 1, 5968.
• Coxhead, A. 2000. A New Academic Word List. TESOL
  Quarterly, 34, (2), 213 - 238.
• Francis, W. N. H. Kucera. 1982. Frequency
  Analysis of English Usage. Boston Houghton
  Mifflin Company.
• Nation, P. 2001. Learning vocabulary in another
  language. New York Cambridge University Press.
• Nation, P. R. Waring. 1997. Vocabulary size,
  text coverage and word lists. In Schmitt, N. and
  M. McCarthy (eds). Vocabulary Description,
  Acquisition and Pedagogy. Cambridge Cambridge
  University Press. 619.