The nature of vocabulary in academic speech of hard and soft-sciences

Little is known about the similarities and differences between the vocabulary in hard-sciences (e.g., Maths, Engineering, Medicine) and soft-sciences (e.g., Business, Law, History), especially in spoken discourse. To address this gap, a Soft Science Spoken Word List (SSWL) was developed for second language learners of soft-sciences at English-medium universities. The list consists of the 1,964 most frequent and wide-ranging word-families in a 6.5 million word corpus of soft-science speech, which represents 12 subjects across two equally-sized sub-corpora. The list may allow learners to recognize 94%–97% of the words in academic speech of soft-sciences. A comparison of the SSWL with Dang's (2018) Hard Science Spoken Word List revealed that although the most frequent 3,000 words are important for comprehending academic speech of both soft- and hard-sciences, the value of these words in soft-sciences is greater than in hard-sciences. Pedagogical implications related to this nature of vocabulary in hard- and soft-science speech are provided

Vietnamese non-English major EFL university students' receptive knowledge of the most frequent English words

The receptive knowledge of 442 non-English major university students in a General English program in Vietnam was measured with Webb, Sasao, and Ballance’s (2017) New Vocabulary Levels Test. It was found that despite 10 years of formal English language instruction, nearly half of the participants had not mastered the most frequent 1,000 words and more than 90% had not mastered the most frequent 2,000 words. The study calls for more attention to high-frequency words in English language instruction in Vietnamese EFL context

A Hard Science Spoken Word List

A Hard Science Spoken Word List (HSWL) was developed and validated to help second language learners of hard sciences better comprehend academic speech at English-medium universities. It consists of the 1,595 most frequent and wide ranging word families in a 6.5-million running word hard science spoken corpus which represents 12 subjects across two equally-sized sub-corpora. Its coverage in different discourse types indicates that the HSWL truly reflects the language in hard science academic speech. The comparison between the HSWL with Dang, Coxhead, and Webb’s (2017) Academic Spoken Word List shows that the HSWL focuses more on specialized vocabulary in hard science speech. Depending on their vocabulary levels, learners may achieve 93%–96% coverage of hard science academic speech with knowledge of the HSWL words

Evaluating lists of high-frequency words: Teachers’ and learners’ perspectives

With a number of word lists available for teachers to choose from, teachers and students need to know which list provides the best return for learning? Four well-established lists were compared and it was found that BNC/COCA2000 (British National Corpus / Corpus of Contemporary American English 2000) and the New General Service List (New-GSL) provided the greatest lexical coverage in spoken and written corpora. The present study further compared these two lists using teacher perceptions of word usefulness and learner vocabulary knowledge as the criteria. First, 78 experienced teachers of English as a second language / English as a foreign language (ESL/EFL) rated the usefulness of 973 non-overlapping items between the two lists for their learners. Second, 135 Vietnamese EFL learners completed 15 yes/no tests which measured their knowledge of the same 973 words. Teachers perceived that the BNC/COCA2000 had more useful words. Items in this list were also better known by the learners. This suggests that the BNC/COCA2000 is the more useful high-frequency wordlist for second language (L2) learners

Online News as a Resource for Incidental Learning of Core Academic Words, Academic Formulas, and General Formulas

Knowledge of academic words, academic formulas and general formulas is essential for second language learners, but resources for incidental learning of these lexical items are very limited, especially in English as a Foreign Language contexts. This study employed a corpus-driven approach to examine the potential of online news for incidental learning of core academic words, academic formulas, and general formulas. Twenty-six corpora were created from voice of America (VOA) news to represent the amounts of reading that learners with the reading speed of 200 words per minute (wpm) and those with the reading speed of 150 wpm could complete within certain periods of time if they read VOA news regularly for 40 minutes per day and 5 days per week. Then, occurrences of core academic words, academic formulas, and general formulas represented by well-known lists in each corpus were counted with corpus-based tools. Analysis showed that the number of core academic words, academic formulas, and general formulas increased steadily as more input was added. Depending on the kind of target vocabulary and the reading speed, reading VOA news regularly for 3 months to 3.5 years would likely offer learners opportunities to encounter nearly all target words/formulas and encounter at least 80% of them 12 or more times in their reading. This finding suggests that online news is a useful resource for incidental vocabulary learning. It also indicates the minimal amounts of reading needed for incidental learning of core academic words, academic formulas, and general formulas

The lexical profile of academic spoken English

This study investigated (a) the lexical demands of academic spoken English and (b) the coverage of the Academic Word List (AWL) in academic spoken English. The researchers analyzed the vocabulary in 160 lectures and 39 seminars from four disciplinary sub-corpora of the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus: Arts and Humanities, Life and Medical Sciences, Physical Sciences and Social Sciences. The results showed that knowledge of the most frequent 4,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words provided 96.05% coverage, and knowledge of the most frequent 8,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words provided 98.00% coverage of academic spoken English. The vocabulary size necessary to reach 95% coverage of each sub-corpus ranged from 3,000 to 5,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words and 5,000 to 13,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words to reach 98% coverage. The AWL accounted for 4.41% coverage of academic spoken English. Its coverage in each sub-corpus ranged from 3.82% to 5.21%. With the help of the AWL, learners with knowledge of proper nouns and marginal words will need a vocabulary of 3,000 and 8,000 word families to reach 95% and 98% coverage of academic spoken English, respectively

The Academic Spoken Word List

The linguistic features of academic spoken English are different from those of academic written English. Therefore, for this study, an Academic Spoken Word List (ASWL) was developed and validated to help second language (L2) learners enhance their comprehension of academic speech in English‐medium universities. The ASWL contains 1,741 word families with high frequency and wide range in an academic spoken corpus totaling 13 million words. The list, which features vocabulary from 24 subjects across four equally sized disciplinary subcorpora, is graded into four levels according to Nation's British National Corpus and Corpus of Contemporary American English lists, and each level is divided into sublists of function words and lexical words. Depending on their vocabulary levels, language learners may reach 92–96% coverage of academic speech with the aid of the ASWL

Open Access Academic Lectures as Sources for Incidental Vocabulary Learning: Examining the Role of Input Mode, Frequency, Type of Vocabulary, and Elaboration

Open access academic lectures are potential sources for incidental vocabulary learning. These lectures are available in various formats (transcripts, audios, videos, and video with captions), but no studies have compared the learning of vocabulary in these lectures through different input modes. This study adopted a pretest–posttest design to compare learning at the meaning recall level of 50 words in the same academic lecture through five input modes: reading, listening, reading while listening, viewing, and viewing with captions. One hundred sixty-five English for Academic Purposes learners in China were assigned to five experimental groups and a control group. The experimental groups received the treatment with the assigned input mode while the control group received no treatment. Results show that although learning occurred through all input modes, only viewing significantly contributed to the learning gains. Frequency of occurrence and type of vocabulary significantly predicted the learning gains, but the type of verbal elaboration and nonverbal elaboration did not. This study provides further insights into the value of academic lectures for incidental vocabulary learning and supports the multimedia learning theory and its principles

A corpus-based study of vocabulary in conference presentations

Understanding conference presentations is an important but challenging task for EAP learners in their academic careers. Given the importance of vocabulary knowledge for comprehension, this study examines (a) the lexical demands of conference presentations, (b) the coverage of the Academic Spoken Word List (ASWL) (Dang, Coxhead, & Webb, 2017) in these presentations, and (c) the extent to which this list can help EAP learners deal with the lexical demands of these conferences. A 565,758-word corpus was created from conference presentations of 20 academic subject areas. Analysis revealed that together with proper nouns and marginal words, the most frequent 3,000 word families of general English covered 96.84% and the most frequent 5,000 word families covered 98.22% of conference presentations. The ASWL itself covered 87.52% of the academic conference presentation corpus and more than 87% of its sub-corpora. If learners’ prior knowledge of general vocabulary is taken into account, learning the ASWL word families may help users to achieve potential coverage from nearly 95% to 97% of conference presentations. Implications on how to transfer the findings to teaching will also be discussed