Presentation on Academic vocabulary size as a predictor of academic success

Description

A rapidly changing feature of EAP is the nature of the environments in which it is use. As a growing number of institutions with environment isScores on tests such as IELTS and TOEFL are well established as a basis for admissions to university, but where English not the dominant local language, international students are often admitted to English-language degree programmes without such a score. Under such circumstances it can be useful to estimate the adequacy of students' knowledge of English for studying through the medium of (lingua-franca) English. A cheap and rapid test for this purpose would be a benefit. The size of the applicants' acadmic vocaublary in English may be hypotehsized to represent an appropriate proxy for their academic proficiency (Milton 2009). Up until now the only available test of this construct has been the 30-item 'academic' section of Nation's Levels test, based on the Coxhead Academic Word List. This paper reports on a new test of academic vocabulary based on the Gardner and Davies (2013) academic vocabulary list, which makes it possible to test the hypothesis above. The test was administered to undergraduate and postgraduate students with English as a foreign language, from a range of academic disciplines and in a variety of non-English-dominant contexts. For a subsample of students, scores on teh test were correlated with final grades for the academic term in which they were tested. Results include the finding that while size of academic vocabulary, as measured by this test, can serve as a predictor of academic success, its predictive value is greater for some linguistic/cultural groups and for som disciplines than for others. References Gardner, D. & Davies, M: (2013). A new academic vocabulary list. Applied Linguistics 35, 1-24. Milton J 2009 Measuring second language vocabulary acquisition. Bristol. Multilingual Matters.

Period	Apr 2015
Held at	BALEAP