A Corpus-Based Investigation of Academic Vocabulary and Phrasal Verbs in Academic Spoken English

Abstract

Academic spoken language is capturing the attention of many vocabulary researchers in recent years (Rodgers & Webb, 2016;Thompson, 2005). In turn, research has focused on assessing word lists to promote second language learners' comprehension of academic speech (Dang & Webb, 2014). The present thesis is comprised of two corpus-based studies investigating academic spoken discourse. The first study examined (1) the vocabulary demands of spoken academic English and (2) the coverage of Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) in spoken Academic English. Transcripts of 62 lectures and 7 seminars form the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) were collected and analyzed. The findings suggested that coupled with proper nouns and marginal words, knowledge of the most frequent 3,000 or 7,000 word families is needed to reach 95.55% and 98.03% coverage respectively of the combined lectures and seminars corpus. The AWL provided 3.68% coverage of the combined seminars and lectures corpus. The second study compared the lexical coverage of Garnier and Schmitt's (2015) phrasal verb list (PHaVE List) with the most frequent 150 AWL lemmatized verbs in academic spokenEnglish. The analysis was carried out on a 2,431,351 running-word corpus created from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) and the MICASE corpora. The finding indicated that the PHaVE List accounted for slightly higher coverage figures than the AWL in the study corpus. Pedagogical implications were made for English for academic purposes teachers, learners and material designers.ii

The potentials for incidental vocabulary acquisition from listening to computer science academic lectures: a higher education corpus-based case study from Macau

“…Upon the completion of the data cleaning process, the lectures were converted into text files and processed by means of AntWordProfiler ( Anthony, 2022 ) to assess the lexical demand of the lectures. AntWordProfiler has been proven useful to investigate the lexical profile and complexity of text (e.g., Aldohon, 2018 ; Moser, 2021 ). In the first round of the data analysis, new proper nouns (e.g., Spotify and Bluetooth ) and marginal words (e.g., wala and mou ) were identified.…”

Transparency of Compounds and their Potential Importance in English Learner Reading Comprehension

“…So the development of vocabulary knowledge is one of the main components in the language learning process, and particularly for the second language (L2) learning process (Hirsh & Nation, 1992;Laufer, 1989;Nation & Webb, 2011;Rodgers, 2013). During the English vocabulary learning process, learners struggle with vocabulary acquisition as a result of an insufficient amount of time that is dedicated to vocabulary learning and teaching in the classroom setting (Aldohon, 2018). Due to the lack of vocabulary knowledge, second language learners can become frustrated by unknown words that they came across in the reading materials (Lipinski, 2010).…”