Professional Documents
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English For Specific Purposes
English For Specific Purposes
English For Specific Purposes
Leading
Learners to Academic Success with
the AWL
Maggie Heeney
Renison University College
mheeney@uwaterloo.ca
October 13, 2012
TESL Canada Conference, Kamloops, B.C.
Some Guiding Questions
How much vocabulary do second
language learners need to read and
write with proficiency?
What words do students need to know?
How do second language learners
acquire vocabulary?
What strategies facilitate vocabulary
acquisition?
“No matter how well the student learns
grammar, no matter how successfully
the sounds of L2 are mastered, without
words to express a wider range of
meanings, communication in an L2 just
cannot happen in any meaningful way”
(McCarthy,1990).
Lack of vocabulary challenges most ESL
undergraduates and affects both
reading and writing ability (Gould,
Nation & Read, 1990)
What is a word?
Lexeme or a meaningful unit of
language found as a headword in a
dictionary
Lemmas are words with inflections… no
change in part of speech…..adapts,
adapting, adapted
Derivations or word families… the other
parts of speech…..adaptation,
adaptabilty
What does it mean to “know”
a word?
Deep vocabulary knowledge (Laufer,
1997)
orthography, pronunciation and spelling
the root word, its inflections and derivations
word meanings from core to peripheral
including connotations and pragmatics
the word’s lexical relationship to other words in
the form of synonyms, antonyms or hyponyms
(Red – Scarlet)
collocations and idioms are especially important
Functional Reading Lexicon
Minimum number of recognized words for reading
comprehension requires a “threshold vocabulary” of 3000
word families (4800 lexical items) Laufer, 1989)
L1 strategies transfer; 80% comprehension
4000 base words are needed for minimal 90-95%
comprehension of non-specific text (Nation ,1990;
Laufer, 1997)
10,000 words needed to understand 95% of non-
specialist text at university level (Hazenberg & Hulstijn,
1996)
14,000 – 17,000 receptive word families in NS
undergraduate lexicon and graduates could have lexicon
of 20,000 word families (Zechmeister et al., 1993)
What words do learners need
to know?
General Service List - GSL (West, 1953)
2000 most common words used in the English
language (Basic reading)
University Word List (UWL) (Xue & Nation,
1984
Excludes the GSL and has 808 words in 11 levels
Academic Word List – (AWL)(Coxhead, 1998)
Excludes the GSL and has 570 lexemes or headwords
(3000 words) in 10 levels that most commonly occur in
academic readings
The AWL
The AWL is divided into sublists:
http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/resources/academicwordlist/Publications/awlsublis
ts1.pdf
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~alzsh3/acvocab/awlhighlighter.htm
AWL Examples
assess
assessable, assessed, assesses, assessing,
assessment, assessments, reassess, reassessed,
reassessing, reassessment, un-assessed
assign
assigned, assigning, assignment, assignments,
assigns, reassign, reassigned, reassigning,
reassigns, unassigned
assist
assistance, assistant, assistants, assisted,
assisting, assists, unassisted
How do students learn?
The mental lexicon can’t be seen.
Learning is incremental as all parts of a
word can’t be learned simultaneously
(Schmitt, 2000).
Receptive knowledge happens before
productive (Nation, 2001).
Vocabulary Acquisition:
Intentional or Incidental?
mheeney@uwaterloo.ca