Description
Vocabulary plays a key role in language proficiency, and as a result, academic vocabulary has long been a focus of attention by both researchers and teachers concerned with the development of students' academic literacy skills. Within English for Academic Purposes, this has in part involved the compilation of academic vocabulary lists, such as Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) or Gardner and Davies' (2014) Academic Vocabulary List (AVL). These lists represent a class of words which are important in academic discourse, but which students may encounter relatively infrequently in other contexts, and have proven to be valuable in a number of ways for both pedagogical and research purposes. Part of the value of the most recent academic lists stems from the fact that they are the product of corpus investigations, and that they encompass words which are attested in corpora of academic discourse. However, the corpora on which they are based are composed of published academic writing, such as research articles and textbooks. It is however well established that meaningful differences exist among the various academic genres (Biber, 2006) and while students read textbooks, research articles and other published academic texts, the assessment genres they produce have very different characteristics (Nesi & Gardner, 2012). It is therefore possible that existing academic vocabulary lists are more relevant for the development of students' receptive skills, and less so with respect to productive skills. This paper presents the results of a corpus investigation into university students' productive vocabulary and adopted the method developed by Gardner and Davies (2014) in the production of the AVL. This method involves a comparison of an academic corpus, divided into discipline areas, and a non-academic corpus, to extract vocabulary which can be considered to be an academic core (as opposed to general vocabulary or subject-specific terminology). For the present investigation two corpora were used: the British Academic Writing (BAWE) corpus, consisting of student assessment writing, and a corpus of writing produced by university students in the UK not related to assessment or other formal academic purposes. An analysis of the relative frequencies of vocabulary in the two corpora resulted in a what can be considered a list of students' productive academic vocabulary. This paper will describe the characteristics of this list, compare it with existing lists, and present pedagogical implications of the results. References Biber, D. (2006). University language: A corpus-based study of spoken and written registers. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Coxhead, A. (2000). A New Academic Word List. TESOL Quarterly, 34, 213–238. Gardner, D., & Davies, M. (2014). A new Academic Vocabulary List. Applied Linguistics, 35, 305–327. Nesi, H., & Gardner, S. (2012). Genres across the disciplines: Student writing in higher education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.| Period | 9 May 2016 |
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| Held at | LUNAS, Copenhagen University |