Procedural vocabulary and EFL writing quality

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???????????????Procedural vocabulary and EFL
writing quality

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• frank_at_liang.com.cn

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• What is procedural vocabulary?
• Hypotheses and methodology
• DIY step by step
• Wrap-up

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What is procedural vocabulary

• General strategic vocabulary consisting of
  lexical items which do not belong to any schema.
• Common core of vocabulary
• With very little content
• An important role in the elaboration of
  rhetorical functions related to the explanation
  of content.

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What is procedural vocabulary

• A frequency list

Functional Words
Procedural Vocabulary
Schematic Vocabulary
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What is procedural vocabulary

• Students require a procedural vocabulary which
  helps them understand the technical (i.e.,
  schematic) vocabulary
• Procedural vocabulary is very useful in
  establishing word meaning.
• The knowledge of how to negotiate the meaning
  of words vs. the knowledge that they have
  meaning in isolation from use

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What is procedural vocabulary

• Marco (1999) identified 9 categories of
  procedural vocabulary, and listed the most
  commonly used PV items in English.

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Hypotheses and methodology 1/3

• Native speakers of English use more procedural
  vocabulary items in their written production than
  do EFL learners
• The number of procedural vocabulary items in
  student writing correlates with the quality of
  their written production.

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Hypotheses and methodology 2/3

• A list of procedural vocabulary items need to be
  created
• Learner texts and a native-speaker corpus need to
  be search for the number of procedural vocabulary
  items
• The frequencies of procedural vocabulary items
  need to be entered into SPSS for correlation
  analysis.

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Hypotheses and methodology 3/3

• Data
• 90 student compositions written by 90 university
  students across 4 years (28,037 tokens)
• The 90 student compositions were rated by 4
  judges, and the average of their scores were used
  to represent the quality of the student essays
• For the purpose of comparison, a collection of
  argumentative essays written by American
  university students was chosen as the reference
  corpus (from LOCNESS) (149,357 tokens).

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DIY step by step

• Major Steps
• List of procedural vocabulary (c\liang\tools\pv.t
  xt)
• File-based concordancing

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DIY step by step

• Count the total number of procedural vocabulary
  items in NNS texts
• Save concordancing results as an Excel
  spreadsheet
• Open NS concordance (c\liang\tools\ns_concordan
  ce.cnc)

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DIY step by step

• Open concordancing results in Excel
• Copy data in file column into SPSS for
  frequency analysis
• Copy results into data.sav as new variable

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DIY step by step

• The new variable is correlated with
  rater-assigned scores.

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Wrap-up
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Wrap-up

• File-based concordancing is more preferable when
  there is a large amount of data to process
• Wordsmith Tools has a user-friendly interface
  with statistical tools such as Microsoft Excel
  and SPSS.

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100100 thanks!

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Example