Academic vocabulary in an English for Academic Purposes course
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2020/11/0048/000463Keywords:
EAP, teaching materials, vocabulary, vocabulary repetitionAbstract
Academic vocabulary instruction can be beneficial to students in EMI universities since academic vocabulary knowledge predicts performance in academic tasks. With the aim to inform EAP materials design, this study examines the occurrence and repetition of high-frequency academic vocabulary in the printed teaching materials used in a presessional EAP course at a UK university. Findings indicate that even when EAP teachers do not design materials with the intention to include high-frequency AVL lemmas, as indicated from the interviews, they do include many. However, the average repetition rate of academic vocabulary was below 10 occurrences and, hence, unlikely to lead to incidental vocabulary learning. Implications for research and pedagogy are discussed.
References
Alothman, K. 2014. Investigating the impact of focusing on academic vocabulary using multiple assessment measures. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Roehampton.
Gardner, D., Davies, M. 2014. A new Academic Vocabulary List. Applied Linguistics 35, 305–327.
Mazgutova, D., Kormos, J. 2015. Syntactic and lexical development in an intensive English for Academic Purposes programme. Journal of Second Language Writing 29, 3–15.
Uchihara, T., Webb, S., Yanagisawa, A. 2019. The effects of repetition on incidental vocabulary learning: a meta-analysis of correlational studies. Language Learning 69, 559–599.
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Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
