Teaching
the Full Range of Academic VocabularyKaye Wiley
When
is vocabulary “academic”?
When we hear the
term academic vocabulary, most of us think
of key words from subjects like social studies (nomad, artifact,
revolution) or
science (photosynthesis, protein, and molecule).
Certainly these specific content words
are
important within a given field, but research in linguistics tells
us that teaching academic vocabulary to English language learners involves much
more than specialized content words. To
comprehend the language of textbooks, ELLs — and indeed all
learners — need a broad
knowledge of general academic words that occur frequently in many
contexts and
across different disciplines.
Consider, for
example, this sentence:
She
buys meat and eggs.
Compare it to this
sentence:
Proteins
from animal sources like meat and
eggs are called complete proteins because they contain essential amino
acids.
Teaching
the terms proteins and amino acids is just the
beginning. Do the
students understand the
concept of sources of things? Do
they
know larger things can contain smaller things?
Do they understand what it means if
something is complete as opposed to
inessential?
Where
do we start?
Since
vocabulary acquisition is cumulative, teachers should first
make sure that student know the 2,000 most frequently used English
words. Research by
Nation and Waring shows that the
2,000 most frequently used words make up more than 80 percent of all
the words
in any given text. Different
versions of
this high-frequency list exist for different age groups, but the words
should
be carefully reviewed. Given
that some
of these words are prepositions, conjunctions, and modals, we cannot
assume
that beginners will be familiar with them, especially when they are
used in
long and complicated sentence forms.
What
words come next?
A second category
of valuable words for new learners is
general academic vocabulary. These
are
frequently used textbook words, such as source, contain, and essential,
which
appear across various academic disciplines.
A good reference for high-use academic
words of this type is the
Academic Word List (AWL), complied by Averil Coxhead.
Although drawn from
college texts, many of the 570 word
families in this list are helpful for student at all levels. Teachers should point out,
however, that some
academic words, such as dimension and vision, can have different
meaning in
different contexts. Words
from the AWL
have been integrated, whenever possible, into the vocabulary pages,
readings
and exercises in Keystone
Building Bridges.
What
about cognates?
A majority of the
words on the AWL and many content-specific
words are also cognates. More
than 40
percent of English words have Latin roots, for example. These provide a
natural bridge from
words in
English to counterparts in romance languages, such as Spanish and
French. Linguists
estimate that English has over
15,000 cognates with Spanish. Since
students don’t always recognize cognates, teachers should
take time to teach
these language links. Also,
care must be
taken to explicitly teach false friends, or words that look the same,
but have
distinct meaning in each language. Explicit
teaching of cognates can
increase word consciousness and
reading comprehension for all learners.
If we target these
three areas of academic
vocabulary — high-frequency words, general academic word and
cognates — we
are
helping English learners gain a critical foothold into the vast world
of text.
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