Thinking about academic lexicons

Last weekend I was in Frankfurt for an EAP Day organized by OUP and ELTAF. The teachers were a mix of those already involved in EAP and those just interested to find out about it, but all were happy to join in and ask questions, even when I plunged them straight into EAP activities first thing on a Saturday morning!

One of the sessions was on EAP vocabulary and as I’ve done before, I started off by asking everyone to write a single word on a blank card that they thought of as typically academic.

In the workshop, I talked about the three categories of vocabulary needed by EAP students developing their own academic lexicon:

- general vocabulary: words in the top 2000 most frequent words in the language, but with a special focus on those apparently common words which have more specific academic uses (table, find, string, etc.)

- core academic vocabulary: as per the Academic Word List

- specialist vocabulary: especially terms used in specific academic disciplines

So how did the teacher’s intuitions about academic vocabulary match up to these different areas?

36% of the words chosen were Top 2000 words. Many clearly fitted into the category of words that are useful in an academic context and have slightly different everyday and academic senses, such as critical, examine and practice. Critical (and criticize and critique) came out as part of the discussion we had about subtly different academic uses. Notice the difference between these two definitions from a general learner’s dictionary (OALD) and the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary of Academic English:

OALD: critical adj: expressing disapproval of sb/sth and saying what you think is bad about them

OLDAE: critical adj: involving making fair, careful judgements about the good and bad qualities of sb/sth

Another 36% of the words chosen by teachers were on the Academic Word List, so solid core academic vocabulary, like significant, criteria, data, assessment and thesis.

The remaining 28% were words which don’t fall into either of the other two categories. Some of these – purport and construe – were clearly very formal and potentially academic in register (both appear in OLDAE), but just not frequent enough to make it onto the AWL. The others form an interesting little group which I may have to consider adding into my workshop next time I give it, and that’s what could be described as words that students won’t actually use in their academic writing, but need to talk about studying. So there were words like dissertation which are about academic study generally (you could add seminar, tutorial, deadline, extension, plagiarism, etc.) and also linguistic metalanguage, such as collocation – the essential terminology you need to talk about language learning (you could add register, hedging, clause, etc.)

To get to this breakdown, I used the Vocabulary Profiler on the Lextutor website, which picks out AWL words and classifies the remainder in terms of frequency. It’s a really useful (free) tool which I gave a demo of in the workshop. I know though that when I've shown it in the past, teachers have come back to me afterwards and said they couldn’t get it to do what I’d shown them. Because the website has so many different tools available, it can be a bit difficult to navigate if you’re not familiar with it. The following link will take you straight to the AWL highlighter tool: http://www.lextutor.ca/vp/eng/ I’ve also put together a short demo:

At the end of the session, I asked everyone to go back to their cards and to classify the word they’d noted down at the start into one of the three groups. 57% of people classified their words correctly, although to be fair, several others chose words which arguably ought to be on the AWL but aren’t!

Thanks to everyone who came for such an enjoyable and stimulating day, I hope you all went away with some food for thought.

 

Tech tools in EAP: an #EAPchat contribution

The topic for next Monday's #EAPchat is:

"What tech is good tech for EAP?"

As I'm going to be away and will miss the chat, I thought I'd share my contribution in advance here instead. To be honest, on the very short, intensive, pre-sessional courses I teach on, I don't get much chance to play around with all the tech stuff I'd really like to, but below are a few things I have managed to squeeze in successfully in the past:

Online dictionaries: Perhaps unsurprisingly with my lexicography background, I'm keen on teaching/ encouraging dictionary skills and I think for EAP, that element of independent learning is even more important, so I use dictionaries a lot in class. Having them up on screen means I can more easily highlight useful features like collocations in examples and specialist senses (which are often the ones relevant in EAP and which students often miss down at the bottom of an entry). I tend to swap between the different online learner's dictionaries available to demo what's available to students:

OUP:  http://oald8.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/ 
CUP: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/
Macmillan:  http://www.macmillandictionary.com/

Vocabulary Profiler: I try to demo the Compleat Lexical Tutor vocab profiler at least once with each class when I'm talking about the nature of academic language and the AWL. I put a text we've been working with through it to highlight the AWL words and show the breakdown of vocabulary (top 2000, AWL and 'specialist'). I don't generally make a big thing of the AWL (there isn't time on such a short course), but I find it helps students get a feel for academic vocabulary and style. Some students, especially from science and engineering tend to like the statistical/mathematical element of it and in my last group, a couple of students (one engineering and the other seismology) independently put their own writing through it and brought me the results. One lad consciously worked on getting his AWL 'score' up to 15% and I have to say, his writing style did noticeably improve! It's probably not an approach I'd actively promote, but if it works for some students ...

Corpora:  I also try to demo a corpus search at least once with a group and again, it depends on the type of students as to whether they latch onto it or not. (I don't push it if it doesn't get a good reaction.) A few years ago, I had a group of mostly Taiwanese English teachers preparing for an MA TESOL who were very into language and loved it. I try to introduce it when a language query has cropped up in class or in feedback on a writing task. I probably wouldn't risk doing a live off-the-cuff search as a first demo (in case it turns out to be messy and more confusing than helpful), instead I'll trial it at home first and if it's looking good, I'll repeat it in class. Patterns following a particular word (following prepositions or verb forms) work particularly well as they show up really clearly on screen (search for the key word then sort right and the patterns appear as if by magic!). Nowadays, I tend to use the BAWE corpus, made up of student writing, because it's the most relevant to what my students are aiming to produce. I know it's available on various platforms, but I access it via Sketch Engine: https://the.sketchengine.co.uk/open/ 

Whenever I use a tool or website in class, I put the link and some basic instructions on Blackboard (the university's online platform on which each class has its own space), so that students can follow up for themselves if they want. I'd love to experiment with other things, but on an intensive course there are so many competing priorities and things to fit in, I'm just pleased with whatever I can squeeze in and even more happy when it turns out to be just the thing to pique some students' interest.

Sorry I won't be able to join in on Monday, but I'll look forward to catching up on all your tips and links after the event ...