Building an Academic Vocabulary Through Reading

Building an academic vocabulary through reading

Rob Waring

www.robwaring.org/

4th JALT Joint Tokyo Conference Toyo Gakuen Hongo Campus Oct 11 2009

Different kinds of vocabulary

1. General service words (go, have, ask, all, in, buy, show, time, government, must)

2. Technical words (thermodynamics, carburetor, stethoscope, barometer)

3. Academic vocabulary (accumulate, acquire, adapt, node, network, notion)

4. Low frequency vocabulary (scrummage, raptor, tarn, heraldry, chive, equine, scouse)

Some maths

90% of what we read in our daily life is non-fiction

To read a native novel, a newspaper or an academic text without a dictionary, students need to know about 8000-9000 words

Beyond the 2000-3000 headword level, specialist texts have their own specialist / technical vocabulary

There are some academic words which appear in many disciplines

Comprehension is best when 98% or more of the words on the page are known. (16,000 words)

You need to read:

18 words to meet the most frequent word in English (the)

234 words to meet all the 25 most frequent words in English once (40% of English)

989 words to meet all the 100 most frequent words in English once (57% of English)

8870 words to meet all the 1000 most frequent words in English at least once. (82.6%)

380,000 words to meet all the 8000 most frequent words in English at least once. (96.4%)

From intermediate level,

·  there’s a 10% gain in comprehension of TOEFL and TOEIC texts for every 1000 words known up to about 8000 headwords

·  to increase your TOEIC score 100 points, students need to increase their vocabulary by about 2000 words to a score of about 800, then it’s an extra 2500-3000 headwords for every 50 additional points.

Ways to learn the academic vocabulary

Decontextually (.e.g. with wordlists or word cards)

Good for a fast learning of meanings (16 times faster than from reading)

Not good for building depth of word knowledge

Contextually through reading intensively (typical reading textbooks)

Good for seeing the words in a controlled environment

Good for checking word knowledge with the exercises that follow

Reading text books tend not to recycle the words much

Often poor at recycling. Often random word selection based on the topic of the text

Contextually in meaningful texts (e.g. graded reading)

Need to know most of the surrounding words (co-text) before learning can take place.

Slow for learning meanings

excellent for learning depth of word knowledge (collocations, phrases,

How?

Wide reading vs. narrow reading

Active reading vs. passive reading

SQ3Rtechnique.

Survey – read headers, charts, skim read the text before reading

Question – to engage, concentrate and focus, make questions before you read

Read – read for the answers to your questions

Recall– stop and think about what was said

Review – at the end look at your questions and try to answer them

Word / phrase focus learning – vocabulary notebooks, highlighting, re-writing, writing questions

Using new words in new contexts – reports, discussions, etc

Building academic reading skills – skimming, scanning, noticing academic signal words

References

The Academic Wordlist http://simple.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Academic_word_list