Transcript Negotiating Individual Learner Vocabulary Acquisition

Negotiating Individual Learner
Vocabulary Acquisition Processes
through Technology
Brent A. Green, Ph.D
Associate Dean
ESL, College Readiness, Testing
Salt Lake Community College
ITESOL 2014 Presentation
Presentation Outline
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Vocabulary Knowledge Defined
Vocabulary Lists
Learner Variability
Use of Technology
Practical Approaches
Assessment
What is Word Knowledge?
• Receptive vs Productive
• Breadth and Depth (Anderson & Freebody, 1981)
Nation’s(2001) Definition of Word Knowledge
Spoken
Form
Written
Word parts
Form and meaning
Meaning
Concepts and referents
Associations
Grammatical functions
Use
Collocations
Constraints on use
R = Receptive
P = Productive
R
What does a word sound like?
P
How is a word pronounced?
R
What does a word look like?
P
How is a word written and spelled?
R
What word parts are recognizable in this word?
P
What word parts are needed to express meaning?
R
What meaning does this word form signal?
P
What word can be used to express this meaning?
R
What is included in the concept?
P
What items can the concept refer to?
R
What other words does this word make us think of?
P
What other words could we use instead of this one?
R
In what patterns does the word occur?
P
In what patterns must we use this word?
R
What words or types of word occur with this one?
P
What words or types of word must we use with this one?
R
Where, when, and how often would we meet this word?
P
Where, when and how often can we use this word?
Traditional Vocabulary Types
(Nation, 2001)
General
Academic
Technical
Low Frequency
The 2000 most frequent words
of English
A list of 570 frequently
occurring word families in
academic texts
Words that occur with very
high or moderate frequency
level within a limited range of
texts
words at the 2,000 - 20,000
frequency level and beyond
Provides 80% coverage of
most texts
Provides approximately 8-12%
coverage of academic texts
Provides 5% coverage of most
texts
Provides 5% coverage of most
texts
most
active
college
personal
involvement
principles
maximize
intensity
underlining
Engage
spectator
gateway
bureaucracy
abduct
aberration
circumvent
The following example illustrates how the words match up an academic passage. Words are color coded to represent which list they belong to. Black words are
GSL words, blue words are AVL words, and green words are common in specific academic disciplines.
Touching the First Base of Community College
Success: Active Involvement
Research indicates that active involvement may be the most powerful principle of human learning and college success (Astin, 1993; Kuh, 2000). It could be considered the
first base of college success because if it's not touched or covered you can't advance to any other base. This principle is the gateway to implementing all other principles of college
success. The bottom line is this: To maximize your success in college, you cannot be a passive spectator; you need to be an active player in the learning process. The principle of
active involvement includes the following pair of processes:

The amount of personal time you devote to learning in the college experience, and

The degree of personal effort or energy (mental and physical) you put into the learning process.
Think of something you do with intensity, passion, and commitment. If you were to approach academic work in the same way, you would be faithfully implementing the
principle of active involvement. One way to ensure that you're actively involved in the learning process and putting forth high levels of energy or effort is to act on what you are
learning. Engage in some physical action with respect to what you're learning. You can engage in any of the following actions to ensure that you are investing a high level of effort
and energy:
Writing. Express what you're trying to learn in print.
Action: Write notes when reading rather than passively underlining sentences.
Speaking. Express what you're trying to learn orally.
Action: Explain a course concept to a study-group partner rather than just looking over it silently.
Organizing. Group or classify ideas you're learning into logical categories.
Action: Create an outline, diagram, or concept map to visually connect ideas.
The following section explains how you can apply both components of active involvement—spending time and expending energy—to the major learning challenges that you will
encounter in college.
(adapted from Green & Andrade 2014)
What Do We Teach?
• Teach the most frequent 2000 words
• Teach the AWL/sub-technical vocabulary, if students are going on to academic
study
• Teach the technical words of a subject after the first two sets of words have been
learned
• Or learners can/will learn technical words once they begin their subject studies or
enter their field of work
• Teach strategies for low-frequency words
(D. Schmitt, 2013)
Challenges to the Traditional “List”
Approaches
• “[General academic word lists fail] to engage with current conceptions of
literacy and EAP, ignore important differences in the collocational and
semantic behavior of words, and do not correspond with the ways language
is actually used in academic writing. [They] …could seriously mislead
students.” (Hyland and Tse, 2007: 236-237)
Considering the role of mid-frequency vocabulary
(Schmitt and Schmitt, 2014)
Hi-frequency
vocabulary
Low frequency
vocabulary
Mid-frequency
3,001 – 8,999
3,000
families
9,000 families
See Nation & Anthony, 2013 for a discussion on how to give learners practice with extensive readers at Mid-frequency
ranges. Link to the mid-frequency readers portal on Paul Nation’s web page. http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/about/staff
/paul-nation .
How Do We Address Learner Variability in
Vocabulary Acquisition?
• Variability occurs because of variation in learners’…
• depth of word knowledge
• breadth of word knowledge
• age
• levels of formal education
• academic literacy
• personal experiences
Practical Applications with Technology
• Courses: Developmental Reading Courses where 70-80% are English
language learners
• Target Domain: Introductory level college texts
• Vocabulary Words:
• Ten words are self-selected from lists of 25.
• Words are Academic Vocabulary List (Gardner & Davies, 2013) taken from target
language reading passages (Psychology 1010, Biology 1010, Economics 1010, etc).
Scarcity and Economic Costs
The 18th-century French philosopher Francois Quesnay was drawn to the study of economics by an observation of a small segment of the
world around him — the market in central-city Paris. He noticed that people would go to the market daily to shop for food. Just as certain as the
arrival of the daily shoppers was the arrival of farmers into the city with food. These suppliers of food came from the agrarian regions in the
countryside surrounding Paris. Every day a flurry of activity would take place as shoppers and farmers exchanged money for food.
What fascinated Quesnay about the process was the absence of any central coordination. It would have been easy to understand the entire
process if someone had been in charge of feeding Paris and had given the instructions necessary for the exchanges to occur. The central
coordinator could have told the Parisians where to go to buy their food, and he could have told the farmers which fruits and vegetables to grow,
how much of each to grow, and finally what price to charge for each item.
But no central coordinator told buyers and sellers what to do. The necessary information came to them through the trial-and-error process we
know as the market. Farmers who grew the wrong kinds of vegetables, who grew too much of one kind of vegetable, or who attempted to charge
too high a price for their vegetables received signals from the market that they were doing something wrong and made adjustments accordingly. If
you walked through the marketplace at the end of the day and saw some farmer with unsold, rotting vegetables, you might be struck by the failure
of the market to coordinate the activities of buyers and sellers. What you would be overlooking, however, is that on any given day the market
successfully coordinates the actions of the vast majority of buyers and sellers. The key mechanism for coordinating this activity is the price system.
So important is the price system in coordinating economic activity that the bulk of this book is devoted to explaining how prices affect the
actions of buyers and sellers. In our Parisian market example, for instance, suppose the sellers of truffles discovered that they could sell more
truffles at prevailing prices, as buyers cluster around their empty stalls at the end of most days clamoring for more truffles. Truffle sellers would
respond by raising prices. The higher prices would induce additional individuals to forsake production of other goods and take to the woods in
search of truffles. At the same time, the higher prices would induce some buyers to substitute truffleless dishes in place of their regular gourmet
meals. In this simple example, you can begin to see how prices—in this case the higher price of truffles—serve to allocate resources among
competing uses and users. This small slice of experience from the Paris market is the "stuff" economics.
Truffles—tuber-shaped edible underground fungus (like mushrooms) with a unique flavor that are collected in the wild. Often pigs are used to
sniff out the location of truffles. Truffles are used in a variety of gourmet dishes and are considered by many to be delicacies.
Economics: A Survey by Barron, Blanchard, and Lynch (2006)
Technology
• Corpora and concordancing programs for list analyses
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• Corpus of Contemporary American English
• WordandPhrase.info
• Lextutor
SCREENCAST-O-MATIC Teacher Generated Video Instructions
Google Docs
Mail Merge
Database Management
Academic Vocabulary List
The AVL words that are found in the reading passages for this chapter are listed in the table below. Review
each word and check the box which corresponds to your current knowledge of the word. Select 10 words, then
complete the AVL Chapter 4 Worksheet for the 10 words you have selected.
Guide
Meaning = I know the word’s meaning
Collocations = I know what common words come before or after this word.
Part of Speech = I know the word’s part of speech (noun, verb, adjective, adverb)
Form = I know other forms of this word (a word’s relatives)
Use = I can use the word correctly in an academic sentence of my own.
Word
acquire
approximately
attempt
benefit
conflict
desire
determine
emerge
Context
In making such decisions, individuals weigh the values and costs of various
choices. In this context, the cost of acquiring a particular good or taking a
particular action is the highest valued alternative you sacrifice.
While approximately half of the lakefront units sell for market rates, prices for
the remaining units are constrained far below market rates—as low as $25 per
month in some instances.
The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) manages 78 housing developments for
families and senior citizens. In an attempt to improve public housing, the CHA
approved a $1.5 billion plan in February 2000 to substantially renovate and
redevelop 25,000 apartments, including 490 units in a complex along Lake
Michigan.
To assess whether you have allocated your scarce resources of time and money
in the most advantageous way, you would have to look at the costs and benefits
of your collage education.
The Occupy Wall Street movement no longer occupies Wall Street, but the issue
of class conflict has captured a growing share of the national consciousness.
Without a firm understanding of positive economics, the normative judgments
we make as consumers, investors, or voters may not actually lead us to the
desired outcomes.
However, violence is not the common method by which individuals or groups
compete for scarce goods within a society or even on an international scale.
Rather, governments establish and enforce rules that determine how we
compete.
Yet even with income as a rationing criterion, there often remain more people
who would like to have the apartment units than there are units available. What
other rules might emerge under these circumstances?
M
C
P
F
U
Academic Vocabulary List Chapter 4
Name: ____________________
Instructions: Select 10 words you would like to study (leave blank those you won’t be using). Underline the word in its context. Search Word and Phrase or the Corpus of
Contemporary American English (COCA) to discover the most frequently occurring words before and after your chosen word. You can choose an on-line dictionary to look
up the definition of the word and write it in the definition box, include the part of speech and other forms of the word (Hint: you can find a list of words and their families on the
class webpage). Finally, write your own sentence using the word. (Hint: When you paste from the Internet select “Paste Special” “unformatted text” )
Word
acquire
1
approximately
2
conflict
5
Context
In making such decisions, individuals weigh the
values and costs of various choices. In this
context, the cost of acquiring a particular good
or taking a particular action is the highest valued
alternative you sacrifice.
While approximately half of the lakefront units
sell for market rates, prices for the remaining
units are constrained far below market rates—as
low as $25 per month in some instances.
The Occupy Wall Street movement no
longer occupies Wall Street, but the issue of
class conflict has captured a growing share
of the national consciousness.
Part of
Speech
Frequent
words
before
Frequent
words after
Other
forms of
the word
Definition
Sentence
Assessment Approaches
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•
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•
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Ask students to report via Google forms their list of words.
Create a database of words and test items
Create your test form
Use mail merge to generate individual tests for learners
Practicality Issues
• Selected and constructed response items
• Item scoring
The End
References
• Green, B. A. & Andrade, M. S. (2014) Developing academic literacy skills. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall Hunt.
• Gardner, D. & Davies, M. (2014). A new academic vocabulary list. Applied Linguistics, 35 (3), 305-327.
• Nation, I. S. P. (2001). Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Nation, P. & Anthony, L. (2013) Mid-frequency readers. Journal of Extensive Reading, 1, 5-16.
• Schmitt, D. (2013). Academic Vocabulary: What is it and how can it be incorporated into a language teaching
program? TESOL Convention Presentation, Dallas, Texas
(http://www.norbertschmitt.co.uk/uploads/27_5155de4671a0c969305072.ppt )
• Schmitt, N., & Schmitt, D. (2014). A reassessment of frequency and vocabulary size in L2 vocabulary teaching.
Language Teaching, 47(4), 484-503.