Vocabulary and English for Specific Purposes Research

Quantitative and Qualitative Perspectives

Averil Coxhead

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367594473
• eBook ISBN: 9781351379564
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This volume provides an important contribution to the study of vocabulary and its relationship to English for Specific Purposes (ESP) research and teaching.

Focussing on quantitative and qualitative approaches, this book draws on a wide range of literature to explores key issues that include: how to identify and categorise specialised vocabulary; and the role and value of word list research in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and ESP. This book features:

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• An analysis of material in a range of different contexts that include secondary school education, pre-university and university-based education, professional and occupational ESP, and the trades.

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• inclusion of many examples of specialised vocabulary from research in Aotearoa/New Zealand and from many other areas in the world.

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• a review of the application of vocabulary research to professional and pedagogical practice

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• suggestions for future directions for research.

Written by a leading researcher, Vocabulary and English for Specific Purposes Research provides key reading for those working in this area.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Introduction

This book is about vocabulary research in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) – that is, technical or specialised vocabulary. The book is meant for established and new researchers, and interested teachers in ESP and vocabulary studies. The aim of the book is to broadly pull together vocabulary research into ESP in one volume, drawing on the strengths of research in vocabulary studies over recent years. ESP is an umbrella term for many areas of specialisation, including English for Academic Purposes (EAP), Professional and Occupational English and English in the Trades. The volume aims to use these discussions as a way to help build our understandings of vocabulary through the lens of ESP. That said, this is not a book about vocabulary acquisition, per se.

ESP vocabulary research includes a broad base of quantitative research, mostly drawing on large-scale, corpus-based analyses of written and some spoken texts in ESP, and a less well-established, but no less important, focus on qualitative research. Qualitative studies can shed light on specialised vocabulary in ways which corpora alone cannot. As Durrant (2014, p. 354) writes, corpus-based studies cannot tell us ‘How students interact with the texts or what they need to be able to know about or do with words to complete their tasks successfully’.

Technical vocabulary is known by a large number of different terms in the field (see Nation, 2013), including semi-technical and specialised vocabulary. A well-known distinction is Beck, McKeown and Kucan’s (2013) three-tier model: basic vocabulary (Tier One), high frequency/utility words that are cross-curricular (Tier Two) and low frequency, domain-/area-specific lexis (Tier Three). This book is concerned mostly with Tier Two and Tier Three vocabulary. I use the term specialised vocabulary.

This volume approaches vocabulary research for ESP by looking first at ways to identify this lexis, word list research in the field and multi-word units. The next section focuses on ESP vocabulary in four contexts: secondary school, university, professional and occupational contexts and trades-based education. The final section is on ESP vocabulary research in language curricula, materials design and testing. The book also aims to identify gaps in these fields and suggest possible research to help fill them.

Why is vocabulary important in ESP?

There are many reasons why vocabulary is important in ESP, and each chapter in this book begins with reasons for investigating this field. Overall, there are several main reasons common to all these areas. The first reason is closely related to a feature of specialised vocabulary in ESP, which is its limited range of use (Nation, 2013). Defining this lexis can be difficult because we need to decide whether only words which are closely related to the subject are specialised or only those that are unique to the subject area are specialised. If we take the first approach, then the definition is much wider and inclusive. If we take the second approach, then the definition is much narrower and exclusive. For this reason, estimating the size of a technical vocabulary is difficult, because a great deal depends on which approach is taken. Estimates of how much technical vocabulary might be in a text can range from 20% to 30% of a text (Chung & Nation, 2003). If up to one word in three in a line of discipline-specific text could be technical in nature, then the sheer amount and frequency of discipline-specific lexical items in specialised texts is a powerful reason why this vocabulary is important.

Nation (2013) points out that Medicine and Botany are fields with large technical vocabularies. Second and foreign language learners need a large vocabulary to cope with their studies in academic or professional environments. Evans and Morrison (2011, p. 203), in a paper on the first-year experience in English-medium higher education in Hong Kong, found a lack of technical vocabulary to be a major source of difficulty for students. In research into vocabulary in trades education, students report the same problem (Coxhead, Demecheleer & McLaughlin, 2016). Vocabulary research in EAP can help identify the single words and multi-word units these learners need. It can also find out more about the vocabulary these learners use in their writing – for example, Hyland and Tse (2007) and Durrant (2014, p. 353) found that vocabulary use differs across disciplines. To use Durant’s examples, philosophy students use specialised adjectives such as ontological, engineers use specialised nouns and Science students use specialised verbs.

Another reason why specialised vocabulary is important is that knowledge of the vocabulary of a field is tightly related to content knowledge of the discipline (Woodward-Kron, 2008). In a longitudinal study of undergraduate students’ academic writing in Education, she writes,

The specialist language of a discipline is intrinsic to students’ learning of disciplinary knowledge; students need to show their understanding of concepts, phenomena, relations between phenomena etc. by incorporating the specialist language and terminology of their discipline into their writing accurately. They also need to adopt the specialist language in order to make meaning and engage with disciplinary knowledge.

(Woodward-Kron, 2008, p. 246)

This engagement with disciplinary knowledge and vocabulary is important also because it signals belonging to a community which shares the same concepts and understandings of a field (Ivanič, 1998; Wray, 2002).

Technical vocabulary in a field may or may not be shared with other technical areas, and learners do not tend to meet this specialised or technical vocabulary outside the discipline of their studies. Medical vocabulary, for example, is typically not included in everyday conversations in English. Plumbing vocabulary tends not to be well known outside the field but can become particularly important in the event of a burst pipe or worse. That said, we all need, at some point, to communicate with plumbers and medical professionals, and it is important that these specialists also know how to help non-specialists understand what they are saying. Vocabulary research can help these endeavours also.

Why am I interested in specialised vocabulary?

My interest in this field developed firstly through teaching in language schools in various countries, such as Romania, Hungary and Estonia. The students in these schools were predominantly adult learners, and many had quite low levels of proficiency in English. Many of these students were professionals, for example, heart surgeons, agricultural scientists, teachers and business people, and their language needs did not seem to be well served by the general English textbooks which made up the curricula in the schools. These textbooks and materials had other important functions for the students, such as helpful ways to meet and talk about general topics, and support for language skills development. At a teacher’s conference in Estonia, Larry Selinker, professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Michigan, gave a talk where he emphasised the importance of empirical research to support learning and teaching. This talk served as a turning point as I began to wonder what sort of empirical research I needed to know about for my teaching, and what assumptions I was making as a teacher.

During my postgraduate studies back in Aotearoa/New Zealand, I began to teach EAP. It was during this time that I became more aware of research in vocabulary studies and how it could inform and, in some cases, transform the learning and teaching objectives of a class. I consulted Jim Dickie at Victoria University, a wise lecturer in my postgraduate studies about doing a thesis as part of my master’s study. Jim said, ‘You know what works, but you don’t know why.’ This was another turning point. And then John Read, also then at Victoria University, mentioned that Xue and Nation’s (1984) University Word List needed updating. So I went to talk to Paul Nation. This is how the Academic Word List (AWL) (Coxhead, 2000) research began. I have been lucky enough to be able to have opportunities to talk about research with these and other great colleagues in Aotearoa/New Zealand and in far-flung places many times over the last 20 years.

How is this book organised?

The book is organised into three main parts. The first part contains the first three chapters, and they focus on different aspects of research into vocabulary in ESP. Chapter 2 looks at approaches to identifying vocabulary in ESP, from corpus-based approaches with quantitative measures through to qualitative approaches, including, for example, using a scale, consulting experts and consulting a corpus for evidence of language in use. Chapter 2 looks into specialised word lists, which is a fast-moving and fairly large area of research. There seem to be more word lists for ESP than ever before. This chapter looks first of all into developing and validating word lists and then moves into showing how word lists have been used to find out more about the nature of specialised texts, particularly in EAP and for finding out about how many words learners need to deal with the vocabulary of these texts (Nation, 2006). Chapter 4 focuses on multi-word units and metaphor, particularly in EAP, because this is where much of the research is to be found. The multi-word unit section of the chapter draws on research into general and specific collocations for EAP, lexical bundles and academic formulas, and on disciplinary perspectives (for example, work by Hyland, 2008; Biber, 2006; Simpson-Vlach & Ellis, 2010; Liu, 2012, to name a few).

Part Two is about vocabulary in a range of contexts, beginning with secondary and Middle School lexis (Greene & Coxhead, 2015) in Chapter 4. Four main subject areas form the main part of this chapter: English Literature, Mathematics, Science and Social Sciences, with examples from written and spoken corpora. Chapter 6 focuses on pre-university, university and postgraduate vocabulary research, which are areas of major activity in EAP. Case studies from a range of subject areas are included, such as Sciences, Agriculture, Engineering, Medicine and Computer Science. Chapter 7 is based on vocabulary in English for Professional and Occupational Purposes, drawing on research into a variety of areas such as Aviation, Legal English and Business and Finance, and occupational vocabulary in Medical Communication and Nursing. The final chapter in this group is on vocabulary in the trades, based on a major research project between Victoria University of Wellington and the Wellington Institute of Technology. The project investigates discourse and lexical elements of four trades: Carpentry, Plumbing, Automotive Engineering and Fabrication. The vocabulary part of the research into each of these trades is discussed in turn and used to illustrate key aspects of vocabulary for specific purposes.

The last part of the book contains two chapters. Chapter 9 is about vocabulary in ESP in relation to teaching, learning and testing. The chapter begins with two overarching frameworks in vocabulary studies: Nation’s (2007) Four Strands and Laufer and Hulstijn’s (2001) Involvement Load Hypothesis, and their relationship to specialised vocabulary in learning and teaching. The chapter also includes a section on using word list research in course design and materials. The final part of the chapter looks at testing in ESP vocabulary research.

Chapters 2 to 9 end with a section on limitations of research in these areas. These limitations are picked up in Chapter 10, where five main areas of needed research are discussed: more qualitative research, testing English vocabulary for specialised purposes, theorising in vocabulary studies (Schmitt, 2010), evaluations of specialised vocabulary research when it is incorporated into courses of study and materials design and the need for replication and, finally, widening the areas of research to include more analysis of spoken language, different contexts of research and multi-word units.

Chapter 2
Approaches to identifying specialised vocabulary for ESP

Introduction

The focus of this chapter is approaches in research to identifying specialised vocabulary for ESP. The chapter begins with considering why this is an important aspect of lexical research in ESP, before moving on to corpus-based quantitative approaches to identifying vocabulary for ESP. Qualitative approaches follow, including analysing concordances from corpora, consulting experts, using a scale, using a technical dictionary, surveys, questionnaires, glossaries and case study analyses of teachers and learner decision making including analysing student texts for annotations. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of how a reader might carry out a research project in this area.

Why is identifying specialised vocabulary important for ESP?

Identifying and categorising academic and disciplinary vocabulary for ESP is important for a range of researchers, learners, teachers and dictionary and materials designers. For researchers, identifying specialised vocabulary in ESP is important because there are many outstanding questions in this field of research. For example, one research question which has been approached in several ways is ‘When does general vocabulary stop and specialised vocabulary begin?’ (see Hwang & Nation, 1995; Coxhead & Hirsh, 2007 for examples). Word list developers need to be aware of these technical meanings of everyday words so that selection principles can be followed as closely as possible (for more, go to Chapter 3). This research needs to be based on solid principles of selection, guided by the context for learning and the proficiency level of the learners. For dictionary and materials designers, identifying specialised vocabulary is important for deciding what lexical items are included in resources and what kind of attention they are given. A good example of the possible impact of a study of specialised vocabulary is the AWL (Coxhead, 2000, 2016a). This list is widely used in textbook series, dictionaries and paper-based and online materials design.

For learners and teachers, identifying this vocabulary is vital for setting goals for learning and for programmes of study, as well as checking a learner’s progress and helping make tomorrow’s vocabulary learning easier (see Nation, 2013). Organising vocabulary learning is important for language learning, so finding out what learners know before they start a course of study can help determine what their vocabulary needs are. These needs might be different depending on the amount of background knowledge in the subject a learner already has and their proficiency in English.

T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Approaches to identifying specialised vocabulary for ESP
• 3 The role and value of word list research for ESP
• 4 Multi-word units and metaphor in ESP
• 5 Specialised vocabulary in secondary school/Middle School
• 6 Pre-university, undergraduate and postgraduate vocabulary
• 7 Specialised vocabulary research and the professions
• 8 Vocabulary in the trades
• 9 Vocabulary research and ESP: curriculum, classroom tasks and materials design and testing
• 10 Future directions and conclusion
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• References
• Index