Towards a productively oriented academic word list.

Most studies of vocabulary in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) (Nation 2001:187-216) have emphasized the importance of a ‘sub-technical’ or ‘academic’ vocabulary alongside core words and technical terms in academic discourse. A variety of word lists have been compiled to meet the specific vocabulary needs of students in higher education settings. The Academic Word List (AWL) (Coxhead 1998) is the most widely used today in language teaching, testing and materials development. It consists of 570 word families that are not in the first 2,000 most frequently occurring words of English as described in the General Service List of English Words (GSL) (West 1953) but which have wide range and reasonable frequency of occurrence in a 3,500,000 word corpus of academic texts. Taken together, words of the GSL and the AWL and domain-specific items should approach the critical 95% coverage threshold needed for reasonable reading comprehension (Nation 2001:197). While the AWL is certainly a good supplement to the GSL for receptive purposes, it is however questionable whether all words in the list should be the focus of productive activities in EAP classes. Learners’ needs for academic writing are clearly not the same as for academic reading.

In this presentation, we will demonstrate how EAP would gain significantly from the design of a productively oriented academic wordlist and we will address important methodological issues for the development of such a list. We will first discuss the notions of frequency, keyness and range and question the widely used criterion of non-appearance in the GSL for the selection of EAP vocabulary. We will then show that a productively oriented academic word list should also be developed on the basis of a careful analysis of learners’ needs: it should give the necessary lexical means for learners to do the things that academic writers do, e.g. stating a topic, hypothesizing, contrasting, exemplifying, explaining, evaluating, etc. In addition, recent corpus-based studies of recurrent word combinations (Biber 2004), lexical phrases (Oakey 2002) and abstract nouns (Flowerdew 2003) in native academic writing have pointed to the existence of an EAP-specific phraseology. It is therefore particularly important that a productively oriented academic word list should introduce new words together with information on how to use them, especially their collocational and colligational environment.

One of the most innovative EAP textbooks to date, Exploring Academic English (Thurstun & Candlin 1997), uses concordance lines to introduce new words in context and to familiarise learners with the phraseology of these words. However, the value of such pedagogical tools for non-native speakers of English would be greatly increased if findings from learner corpus data were also used to select which words and word sequences to teach (Flowerdew 1998; Granger 2004). By way of illustration, we will analyse the lexical means used by English speakers and non-native learners of English to give examples and show how learner corpora can provide useful information on learners’ difficulties in terms of underuse, overuse and misuse of target words or multi-word sequences and use of learner idiosyncratic sequences (De Cock 2003).

References

-  Biber, D. (2004) Lexical bundles in academic speech and writing. In Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk B. (Ed.) Practical Applications in Language and Computers (PALC 2003). Frankfurt am Main:Peter Lang, 165-178.

-  Coxhead, A. (1998) An Academic Word List. English Language Institute Occasional Publication 18. Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington.

-  De Cock, S. (2003) Recurrent Sequences of Words in Native Speaker and Advanced Learner Spoken and Written English: a corpus-driven approach. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Louvain-la-Neuve: Université catholique de Louvain.

-  Flowerdew, J. (2003) Signalling nouns in discourse. English for Specific Purposes 22, 29-346.

-  Flowerdew, L. (1998) Integrating ‘Expert’ and ‘Interlanguage’ Computer Corpora Findings on Causality: Discoveries for Teachers and Students. English for Specific Purposes 17(4), 329-345.

-  Granger, S. (2004) Computer learner corpus research: current status and future prospects. In Connor U. & Upton T.A. (eds.) Applied Corpus Linguistics: A Multidimensional Perspective. Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi, 123-145.

-  Nation, P. (2001) Learning Vocabulary in another Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

-  Oakey, D. (2002) Formulaic language in English academic writing: A corpus-based study of the formal and functional variation of a lexical phrase in different academic disciplines. In Reppen, R., Fitzmaurice S.M. & Biber D. (Eds.) Using Corpora to Explore Linguistic Variation. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Longman, 111–129.

-  Thurstun J. & Candlin, N. (1997) Exploring Academic English. A workbook for student essay writing. Sydney: Macquarie University.

-  West, M. (1953) A General Service List of English Words. London: Longman.