The relationship between academic vocabulary coverage and scores on a standardized English proficiency test

Paribakht, T. Sima; Webb, Stuart

doi:10.1016/j.jeap.2015.05.009

Cited by 24 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…The second trend is to determine the coverage of Coxhead (2000) Academic Word List (AWL), developed from a written corpus, in academic spoken discourse. These studies reveal that the AWL provided 2.4% coverage of student presentations (Hincks, 2003), 4.9% coverage of lectures (Thompson, 2006), 4.41% of lecture and seminars (Dang and Webb (2014)), and 6.48% coverage of university admission listening comprehension tests (Paribakht & Webb, 2016). These coverage figures are much lower than the coverage of the AWL in academic written English (10%), which suggests that vocabulary in academic speech is distinctive from that in academic writing.…”

Section: Vocabulary In Spoken Academic Contextsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Single and multi-word unit vocabulary in university tutorials and laboratories: Evidence from corpora and textbooks

Coxhead

Dang

Mukai

2017

Journal of English for Academic Purposes

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Single and multi-word unit vocabulary in university tutorials and laboratories: Evidence from corpora and textbooks Small-group academic interactions, such as tutorials and laboratory sessions, do not often feature in vocabulary or English for Academic Purposes (EAP) research. Yet across many disciplines in tertiary education, students are required to attend and participate in these speaking and listening events. EAP students need to be prepared for them, and their textbooks should help them prepare also. The present study included interview data from lecturers and students which identified specific issues with speaking in small groups in university; corpus-based analysis of tutorials and laboratory sessions which showed large amounts of high frequency vocabulary; and an EAP/ESP textbook analysis showed little focus on vocabulary in tutorials and nothing on laboratories. A total of 176 phrases were suggested in three textbooks as being useful for expressions for speaking in small groups. An analysis of these phrases in the corpus showed that three quarters of these phrases did not appear in the laboratory corpus and two thirds did not appear in the tutorial corpus. Finally, lexical patterns from the corpus were identified and categorised in the same way as existing lists of multiword units in spoken academic English. Implications for pedagogy and materials design are followed by suggestions for future research. 1.Introduction English for Academic Purposes (EAP) research has focused predominantly on writing for the university (Skyrme, 2010), with some attention in terms of academic speaking focused mostly on lectures (Feak, 2013), particularly with regard to discourse in lectures (Jordan, 1997) and student problems with understanding content in lectures (Basturkmen, 2016; Crawford Camiciottoli, 2010). Student presentations have been the focus of some research (e.g., Hincks, 2003), and are an area of concern for second language speakers of English (Kim, 2006). Lectures and student presentations are mostly one-way, in that one speaker tends to hold the floor. Basturkmen (2016) notes that there is limited research into academic speaking which involves interaction between speakers, such as between lecturers and students or students and students. This form of 'dialogic

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Section: Vocabulary In Spoken Academic Contextsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Single and multi-word unit vocabulary in university tutorials and laboratories: Evidence from corpora and textbooks

Coxhead

Dang

Mukai

2017

Journal of English for Academic Purposes

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“…In the academic setting, more attention has been diverted to academic vocabulary. Paribakht and Webb [20] investigated the relationship between academic word coverage and testees' performance on CanTEST (one standardized language proficiency test for the purpose of college admission). The results did not show any correlation between academic word coverage and listening and reading comprehension.…”

Section: Specializationmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Comparison of TOEFL iBT and IELTS Reading Tests

Liu¹

2018

JSS

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With the increasing popularity among test takers and mounting acceptance from academic institutions, TOEFL iBT and IELTS are regarded and treated as equals due to similar purposes and goals. In depth, they distinguish each other in various aspects. By integrating Bachman's framework of test method facet and Alderson's variables of reading nature, this article formulates a comparison framework in an attempt to compare the reading parts of these two tests. The results show they share more similarities in test rubrics and input format and slightly differ from each other in score method and specification of procedures and tasks. However, substantial differences are identified in such areas as the nature of language and characteristics of tasks, which has a significant impact on test takers' performance because TOEFL iBT reading test is more difficult in terms of readability, text types, topical features and question types, while IELTS more complex in text length and grammatical intricacy.

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“…A large number of word lists that are available for EAP classes have been used in two main ways. First, teachers have simply adopted the existing word lists in their class activities without any changes (see Paribakht & Webb, , for applications of word lists). Second, teachers have adapted existing word lists, for example, by shortening an existing list through focusing only on the words appearing in target texts for class lessons.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tailoring academic words to multidisciplinary EAP classes

Pojanapunya

2019

TESOL Journal

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Prioritizing vocabulary for instruction is central to English for academic purposes (EAP) research. Several word lists have been created to serve different needs, with many of them being restricted to a basic classification as general, academic, and technical words. Although discipline-specific vocabulary lists are useful for particular disciplines at one end of a continuum, and more general, common core vocabulary lists are useful for a range of disciplines at the other end, this study identified multidisciplinary words that lie in the middle and could be used by disciplines at either end of the continuum. The study identified important words in corpora of research articles collected from six disciplines with regard to common disciplinary domains in the hard and soft sciences. The target words of six disciplines were compared and examined with regard to whether they occurred in only one or many disciplines. With consideration for variability of word use across disciplines in the same disciplinary domain, words in hard sciences showed higher variability than others. The findings are discussed in terms of academic word identification, selection, and use in EAP classes.

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The relationship between academic vocabulary coverage and scores on a standardized English proficiency test

Cited by 24 publications

References 52 publications

Single and multi-word unit vocabulary in university tutorials and laboratories: Evidence from corpora and textbooks

Single and multi-word unit vocabulary in university tutorials and laboratories: Evidence from corpora and textbooks

A Comparison of TOEFL iBT and IELTS Reading Tests

Tailoring academic words to multidisciplinary EAP classes

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