Enhancing the acquisition of discipline-specific vocabulary through student concordancing

This Master’s Project focuses on advanced-level English learners\u27 acquisition of discipline-specific vocabulary as they transition from intensive English programs into English-medium university coursework. During this period, the number of discipline-specific terms students must master quickly and independently can be overwhelming. To address this problem, this M.A. Project argues that vocabulary-acquisition strategies should be foregrounded in intensive English programs, and that instructors should train students to supplement traditional vocabulary learning methods with independent concordancing strategies. Using concordancers, students can research vocabulary items by scanning a corpus (a large collection of texts) to retrieve examples of discipline-specific terms within authentic texts, revealing patterns of usage and collocation, and facilitating deeper knowledge of new lexical items that can result in more accurate production. Although many applied linguists have promoted student concordancing, few teaching resources are available on the topic. Therefore, this project outlines an instructional unit scaffolding the process of independent student concordancing. It provides criteria for teachers to consider when selecting a corpus to suit instructional contexts and aims. It provides an overview of the Corpus of Contemporary American English, a large corpus that is freely accessible online, and it examines the features of its integrated concordancer that can help students learn to utilize corpus data for vocabulary learning. Finally, the project relates the writer’s tentative steps in introducing students to concordance data in his teaching, and it presents his experience using corpus-based tools in his own second-language academic writing

Developing a Visual Dictionary for Nursing Students

Communication skills are highly needed for today’s society. English, as the lingua franca, is considered a soft skill that every sector, including nursing, needs to focus on to work towards global development. Nursing candidates are expected to be accustomed with terminology and vocabulary related to their major in English. However, the available learning materials are not always suitable for vocational students and their syllabi are often still too general. As a result, many students experience language barriers in understanding specific terminologies and vocabularies within the scope of nursing. This study aimed to develop discipline-specific vocabulary in the form of a visual dictionary for nursing students. The ADDIE model was employed, and questionnaires and interviews were used to gather the data. The findings of this study are expected to support the needs of students related to their major and future career.  Keywords: visual dictionary, nursing students, supplementary material&nbsp

Teaching strategies for lecturers and tutors to assist non-English mother tongue tertiary students: Summarising, paraphrasing and vocabulary enrichment

Given the increasingly globalised nature of tertiary education and the growth of English as a second or other language, high numbers of international students studying at English medium tertiary institutions have English as a second (L2) or additional language (EAL). But few efforts may be made to accommodate such students who report that the main difficulty relates to proficiency in English language, and that this results in greater stress and anxiety (Andrade 2006). The key skills of summarising and paraphrasing are reliant upon understanding of concepts and information, in written and oral forms. How can essential content be covered in lectures and tutorials so as to include assistance for non-native speakers of English? I consider a range of pedagogical strategies that can be adopted by university lecturers and tutors to enable EAL students to summarise and paraphrase effectively so as to demonstrate mastery of discipline-specific vocabulary.

Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition as Student Performance Determinant in Undergraduate Research Modules

Vocabulary knowledge plays an important role in determining a person’s language proficiency level. This study investigates the role vocabulary plays in determining students’ performance within research modules at private higher education institutions (HEIs). The discipline-specific vocabulary in this study includes target words, sampled from an undergraduate research module’s prescribed textbook. A mixed-method design is used to explain students’ challenges and concerns with regard to research modules. An investigation is launched into students’ research vocabulary acquisition by administering pre- and post-testing with regular reliability. By measuring the students’ research vocabulary acquisition, the effectiveness of the research module’s (mostly incidental) learning process is determined. The relationship between the students’ research vocabulary acquisition and their research module performance as part of a Bachelor of Education degree (B.Ed.) curriculum is also established. This study contributes to the development of best practices and the advancement of institutional research development across HEI; it also stimulates interdisciplinary engagement within the research field research modules at HEI in South Africa

Learning Moo-re About the Dairy: Publishing a Middle Level Place-Based Informational Text

This manuscript describes the creation of an middle level informational text about the local university dairy. The place-based assignment introduced the elementary education teacher candidates to the everyday workings of the university dairy. The preservice teachers engaged in the writing process throughout the creation of the informational text

Resources for Interdisciplinary Understanding of Energy

In most undergraduate curricula, students are expected to have the ability to apply, or transfer, a learned concept to new coursework. In the sciences, students are often introduced to energy ideas with discipline-specific vocabulary and tasks which encourage compartmentalized, surface-level understandings of energy concepts. Our research investigates student transfer of energy ideas within a coherent science course series, where physics is the foundational course. Similar modeling tools and vocabulary are used in the classes to help students see energy as a unifying framework. We seek to identify and describe what transfer “looks like” in this idealized context by interviewing students enrolled in the next three science courses in the series. They are asked to describe and explain scientific phenomena they have not yet encountered, but to which it is possible to apply energy concepts from the prerequisite physics course. Our qualitative analysis focuses on the identification of the energy concepts students utilize during their reasoning process. We aim to better understand the resources students activate and the obstacles they encounter when attempting this transfer

A Brief Introduction to Academic Language

The theoretical concept of “academic language” came from research related to the education of speakers of other languages. Cummins (1981, 1984) made a distinction between “basic interpersonal communicative skills” (BICS) which are the language skills that are needed for casual, face to face communication, and “cognitive/academic language proficiency“(CALP), which refers to the specific literary language that is required in academic settings. Cummins described CALP as being more cognitively demanding than everyday interactions, and decontextualized, requiring students to use language in situations where they have relatively few contextual cues (like the intonation, facial expressions and gestures of BICS). In addition, academic language depends on a “preferred” set of language skills based upon accepted school practices. These skills include such things as discipline-specific vocabulary and phraseology, standardized grammar, discourse structures, and particular pragmatic conventions such as using a formal tone or register in both speaking and writing, using specified structures and procedures for completing work, and demonstrating compliance through certain body postures, facial expressions, tone of voice, ways of setting text on paper, etc

ESP vocabulary building strategies promoting autonomy

Vocabulary has been considered an essential element in learning a language and, within English for Specific Purposes (ESP), the lack of discipline-specific vocabulary can be identified as an obstacle to student success. The paper reflects upon the experience of teaching ESP at a university, examines students' awareness of vocabulary learning strategies and presents one strategy involving technology and promoting autonomy. The paper compares student performance in three different courses, one being a special course entitled English Autonomously where students select their own content from a prepared list of modules and the others being English for Lawyers and English for Mathematicians. While students choosing a vocabulary building module of English Autonomously have been found to be active seekers and users of a variety of learning strategies, students of two other courses need more help with looking for effective ways of developing their vocabulary. The application Quizlet can be successfully employed within language courses and it proved to be efficient in both English for Lawyers and English for Mathematicians courses. Apart from activities with flashcard sets, two specifically designed Quizlet tasks assisted students with broadening their technical vocabulary knowledge: providing example sentences and generating practice for reading mathematical expressions

An exploration of the sub-register of chemical engineering research papers published in English

The increased pressures for high-volume, high-impact publications in English language and the high rejection rates of submitted manuscripts for publications present an often unsurpassable obstacle for (early career) researchers. At the same time, register variation of peer-reviewed journals—that can contribute to whether a paper is accepted for publication—has received little attention. This paper redresses this gap, by investigating the register (especially discourse moves and lexical choices) in 60 published, original-research articles on wastewater treatment published in four Chemical Engineering journals, with impact factor (IF) above 2. Our survey shows that chemical engineering research publications tend to comply with a set of requirements: multidisciplinarity, brevity, co-authorship, focus on the description of practical results (rather than methods), and awareness of non-specialised audiences. Lexical choices were analysed through frequency tables, phrase nets and word trees produced by data visualisation software (ManyEyes). It was found that less discipline-specific vocabulary is used in higher IF journals and this is interpreted within the current context of manuscript publication and consumption. This study concludes that data visualisation can provide an efficient and effective tool for prospective authors that wish to gauge telling details of the sub-register of a specific journal