ALIS Newsletter - October 2015 (Plain Text Version)

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In this issue:
LEADERSHIP UPDATES
•  LETTER FROM THE EDITORS
•  LETTER FROM THE CHAIR
•  LETTER FROM THE INCOMING CHAIR
ARTICLES
•  A NEW ACADEMIC VOCABULARY LIST
•  PLAY AND COGNITION IN THE EAP CLASSROOM
•  LEARNING GRAMMAR BY EAR
•  MAKING HUMOR TEACHABLE: A FOCUS ON MICROSKILLS DEVELOPMENT
ABOUT THIS COMMUNITY
•  APPLIED LINGUISTICS INTEREST SECTION (ALIS)

ARTICLES

A NEW ACADEMIC VOCABULARY LIST

Dee Gardner, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, USA

The role of academic vocabulary in the school success of ELLs is well established (Nagy & Townsend, 2012). Simply stated, those who have sufficient vocabulary knowledge are better readers and writers than those who do not. By extension, those who read and write well perform better in school overall, and they are much better equipped to pass the gate-keeping tests of higher education (e.g., ACT, SAT, GRE, GMAT, LSAT, MCAT), thus improving their opportunities for economic success (Gardner, 2013). The same is true for native-language learners. These facts have fueled the extensive interest in vocabulary learning and teaching in academic settings. However, part of the problem with vocabulary training is that there are several million lexemes of English (words with different meanings), and many new words enter the language every year. Where does one begin to learn or teach from such an enormous pool of words?

With this in mind, my colleague and I analyzed a corpus of more than 120 million running words of academic English and found that a relatively small number of distinct words (3,015) were much more common among the nine major disciplines of our academic corpus than they were in general English (Gardner & Davies, 2014). We formalized these words into the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL). This new list is different in many ways from the Academic Word List (AWL; Coxhead, 2000), which has served language education well for more than 15 years. I highlight these differences in what follows.

1. The AWL was based on a corpus of 3.5 million words of academic English, mostly from New Zealand. The AVL was based on a corpus of 120 million words of academic English, primarily from the United States.
   
   
2. Word counts in the AWL were based on word families (base word forms with their inflections and transparent derivatives), whereas the AVL counts were based on lemmas (base word forms distinguished by part of speech—nouns, verbs, adjective, adverbs—together with their simple inflections). The example in Table 1 illustrates the difference.

   The value of considering lemmas over word families is obvious in this example, as proceeds, the noun (n), pronounced with stress on the first syllable, and proceeds, the verb (v), pronounced with stress on the second syllable, would be erroneously considered as being the same word family, but they would be correctly treated as being different lemmas. Likewise, the noun proceedings (meaning records or minutes), the noun procedure (meaning technique), and the adjective procedural (meaning technical or routine) would be counted as their own lemmas instead of as part of the same word family. Also, knowing that a particular word is functioning as a noun or a verb or an adjective helps to constrain the possible meanings of that word. For example, it makes a big difference if we know that study is a noun (e.g., They will complete the study) instead of a verb (e.g., She will study for the exam).
   

   Table 1. Example of word family versus lemmas

   One Word Family (AWL) = Proceed Proceeds Procedural Procedure Procedures Proceeded Proceeding Proceedings

   Four Lemmas (AVL) Proceed (v) Proceeds (v) Proceeding (v) Proceeded (v) Proceeds (n) Proceedings (n) Procedure (n) Procedures (n)

   
   Note: yellow here and hereafter indicates academic core words

3. The AWL was built on top of the General Service List (GSL; West, 1953), a list of 2,000 high frequency word families of English. In other words, any academic words appearing on the GSL were not considered in the AWL (e.g., company, market, account, business, capital, exchange, interest). In contrast, words on the AVL were derived purely by statistics—that is, all words were considered if they appeared statistically more often in academic materials than in other registers of English, and if they had sufficient coverage across nine disciplines of academic English: (1) education; (2) humanities; (3) history; (4) social science; (5) philosophy/religion/psychology; (6) law/political science; (7) science/technology; (8) medicine/health; and (9) business/finance. The result is that the AVL contains academic words at all levels of frequency, making it possible to more effectively address the core academic vocabulary needs of learners at essentially any level of proficiency.
   
   To illustrate this point, Table 2 provides examples of AVL lemmas at three different frequency bands. It is clear that AVL lemmas in the first column are much more frequent and basic than those in the second and third columns. Despite the relative differences in frequency and sophistication, all of these lemmas are what I refer to as being “saturated with academic sense.” In other words, these words are likely to occur in many different academic disciplines, thus validating their “core” status.
   
   

   Table 2. AVL lemmas at three different frequency bands

   Rank 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

   AVL Lemma study group system social provide however research level result include important process use development data information effect change table policy

   POS n n n j v r n n n v j n n n n n n n n n

   Rank 1501 1502 1503 1504 1505 1506 1507 1508 1509 1510 1511 1512 1513 1514 1515 1516 1517 1518 1519 1521

   AVL Lemma bridge individualism noteworthy impetus experimentation sequential continuation attributable disparate safeguard suppression subset markedly concurrent degrade incompatible tenet unify indispensable intended

   POS v n j n n j n j j v n n r j v j n v j j

   Rank 2996 2997 2998 2999 3000 3001 3002 3003 3004 3005 3006 3007 3008 3009 3010 3011 3012 3013 3014 3015

   AVL Lemma unidirectional redirection reversion obtainable privation inborn bimonthly capitalistic circumscribed targeting unusable unpalatable causally prioritization overemphasis imprimatur coherently component tangential relevancy

   POS j n n j n j r j j n j j r n n n r j j n

   
   (n = noun; v =verb; j= adjective; r = adverb)

4. AVL lemmas were subsequently grouped into word families to meet certain learning, teaching, and research purposes. Unlike the AWL, however, AVL families maintain their lemma distinctions within the word families, as the comparison in Table 3 shows. In the AVL case, we can see that only three lemmas are actually on the AVL—control (noun), control (verb), and uncontrolled (adjective). The two red lemmas, controller (noun) and controlled (adjective), are specialized (technical) academic words in the disciplines of science and medicine, respectively. The four gray words, while part of the control family from a purely linguistic perspective, are not found statistically more often in academic materials than they are in general English. The numbers next to the words indicate the frequency of the words in the academic corpus, thus giving some indication of the relative importance of the words. Such detail is very useful for teachers, learners, researchers, and materials writers.
   

Table 3. Example of AWL word family versus AVL word family

Knowing what is common or core in academic materials (the AVL) allows us to be more precise in determining what is specialized in those materials. Table 4 shows how academic vocabulary can be focused on in terms of academic core words (AVL—yellow), discipline core words (from the general core of English—magenta), and discipline technical words (within specific disciplines—red). All of these are derived statistically from the academic corpus.

Finally, our dynamic web interface contains important information about all words on the AVL, and also allows users to input any text and receive detailed information about the academic core words (AVL) and discipline-specific words (technical) in that text. This tool is particularly well suited for many academic reading and writing purposes.

Table 4. Academic vocabulary levels

References

Coxhead, A. (2000). A new academic word list. TESOL Quarterly, 34, 213–238.

Gardner, D. (2013). Exploring vocabulary: Language in action. London, England: Routledge.

Gardner, D., & Davies, M. (2014). A new academic vocabulary list. Applied Linguistics, 35(3), 305–327.

Nagy, W., & Townsend, D. (2012). Words as tools: Learning academic vocabulary as language acquisition. Reading Research Quarterly, 47(1), 91–108.

West, M. (1953). A general service list of English words. London, England: Longman, Green.

Dee Gardner is a professor of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. He specializes in vocabulary, reading, and applied corpus linguistics.