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The Vocabulary Research
The Language Center puts a great emphasis on the acquisition of vocabulary. A team of teachers was formed to identify the most frequent and useful vocabulary for students in this context and establish vocabulary lists and sub-lists that could then be used for learning, teaching and assessment. The vocabulary team has managed to establish sub-lists for all five levels of the intensive program. These lists along with the rationale appear on the next pages. A tremendous work and effort has been put into this project so it is hoped that the teachers and materials writers will take advantage of this resource to help the students learn English more effectively and efficiently. Another team of teachers managed to develop a wide range of online vocabulary activities based on vocabulary sub-lists for Levels 2 and 3 and we plan to do the same for the other levels and programs.
Introduction to the Language Center’s word lists.
The creation of the vocabulary lists went through a number of stages. The purpose of creating a vocabulary inventory for the language center was to direct the students’ acquisition of vocabulary by identifying the most frequent and useful words relevant to their context and study requirements. Instead of simply basing our lists on existing international lists that were created for a certain audience and context, we devised our own selection criteria in order to produce practical and meaningful lists in a scientific way. The teaching experiences of the members of the vocabulary project group and also feedback from other staff members played a very important role in including and excluding certain words. The development of these underwent several stages some of which are listed below:
1. Choosing words for the initial word list: This was based on a set of criteria.
2. Choosing word forms: The word list and sublists were not solely based on head words. As a rule, where the GSL list included both verb and noun forms of a particular lexical item (e.g., behave/behavior, connect/connection, discover/discovery, discuss/discussion, know/knowledge), the verb form was included in the Level 2 sublist and the noun in Level 3 (with a few exceptions such as direct/direction and educate/education, where it was felt that both forms were of immediate relevance). This was true also for adjective/noun pairs (difficult[2]/difficulty[3], dirty[2]/dirt[3], healthy[2]/health[3], honest[2]/honesty[3], hungry[2]/hunger[3], etc.). The rationale for this was that everything could not be learned at once in Level 2, the verbs were more important and the adjectives more easily used, and when the noun forms were encountered in Level 3 it would be a good chance to revisit and remember the verbs and adjectives learned in Level 2.
3. Choosing words for teaching and testing. For each level and for practical reasons, we had to create a sublist of words that could be reasonably taught and tested in the classroom. If a word or a word form appears 6 to 8 times or more in the three corpora combined it is in bold.
4. Creating a known Word list: This includes the words which are assumed to be known by the majority of the students upon admission to SQU. This list will be further refined based on feedback from future diagnostic vocabulary tests.
The following criteria were developed for including and excluding certain words in or from our lists despite their existence or nonexistence in the GSL and AWL:
Inclusion criteria
- Some of the words for colors.
- Although GSL formed the base list for the selection and choice of words, some of them which are not in the GSL are also included, because of their high frequency and because, they met the requirement of the selection criteria, e.g, "did", "does".
- Words with a frequency of 6 and more in the corpus have found place in the list.
- Generally speaking, only the base form of a verb or a noun is included and not the derivatives and the inflected forms E.g. 'explain' is in the list but not 'explained', 'bear' is in but not 'bearable'. 'book' is include but not 'books' Some of the derivatives are included because of their very high frequency.
- Words that appear in certain level do not normally appear in the higher level list(s).
Exclusion criteria
1. Any word which appears in one list does not appear in any other list.
2. Words for months, days, numbers, professions do not appear in the lists.
3. The comparative and superlative forms of regular adjectives and adverbs are not included.
Learning the vocabulary lists
The main purpose of creating these vocabulary lists is to enable the students acquire the most frequent vocabulary items in English. The words in these lists came from a corpus analysis. The corpus for each level was composed of texts from three main sources:
1. The teaching material for the level
2. A selection of graded readers used in each Level
It is therefore vitally important that the students are encouraged to read English texts especially graded readers.
Below is a detailed description of an approach suggested by the vocabulary team to help Language Center teachers address vocabulary in their classrooms. The approach was based on the work by Paul Nation.
The four strand approach:
GOAL: To balance the 4 strands evenly across the entire program, meaning that each of the four separate skill classes in all five levels should contain a vocabulary-focus component which includes three of the four strands woven into the methodology, syllabus, and course materials.
THE four STRANDS:
1) Comprehensible Meaning-Focused Input
� vocabulary through listening and reading activities
(works best when there is 95% coverage; cannot work when there are too many unknown words; graded readers, dictogloss, communication activities)
2) Language Form-Focused Learning
� direct teaching and study of vocabulary
(vocabulary flashcards, vocabulary notebooks, dictionary exercises, lists, quizzes, online exercises, CALL, reading difficult texts, etc.)
3) Meaning-Focused Output
� speaking and writing focus on vocabulary development
(communication activities, discovery learning, inter- and intra-group interactions, research-based presentations and writing)
4) Fluency Development
� working with vocabulary already known
(not new words – without this, new gains are quickly lost; review games, repeated reading, speed reading, below-level graded readers, 10-minute writing)
THE ESSENTIAL RUBRIC
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PROGRAM LEVEL
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LANGUAGE SKILL
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STRANDS TRIAD
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ACTIVITIES/ TECHNIQUES
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TIME REQUIRED
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MEANING-FOCUSED
INPUT
Reading
Listening
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FORM-FOCUSED LEARNING
Reading
Listening
Writing
Speaking
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MEANING-FOCUSED
OUTPUT
Writing
Speaking
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FLUENCY DEVELOPMENT
Reading
Listening
Writing
Speaking
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READING
Meaning-Focused Input
Form-Focused Learning
Fluency Development
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LISTENING
Meaning-Focused Input
Form-Focused Learning
Fluency Development
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WRITING
Meaning-Focused Output
Form-Focused Learning
Fluency Development
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SPEAKING
Meaning-Focused Output
Form-Focused Learning
Fluency Development
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Vocabulary teaching plan for all proficiency levels
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Skill
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Strand
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Activity
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Time
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Listening
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Meaning-Focused Input
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Dictate words (wds), students (ss) sort them into meaning categories using dictionary. Title can be given or not given by the teacher (T). E.g. Divide 12 wds into 3 categories. chair, lunch, town, class, city, dinner, table, coffee, breakfast, cup, country, tea.
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2-3 mins
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Form-Focused Learning
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Dictate a selection of wds that share the same sounds, but may be spelt according to different rules, e.g. date, great, wait, eight etc
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2 mins
+ feedback
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Fluency Development
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Use only known wds and grammatical features and preferably familiar content knowledge. Allow ss to control the task and help them to plan. Ss should be interested in the message they are sending or receiving, time pressure, competition (with own earlier performance or with others, or opportunity to repeat a task.
Listening for several minutes.
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May vary
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Reading
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Meaning-Focused Input
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Identifying lexical chains by e.g. underlining or circling associated wds. Ss then identify the type of relationship between wds in chain such as collocations, synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms and their super-ordinates E.g, collocations –shed skin, fish scale, synonyms- found, discovered, antonyms – harmless, dangerous, hyponyms snake, python and its super-ordinate - reptile
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5-7 mins
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Form-Focused Learning
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Ss find wds in a text that are derivatives. E.g., Find three wds in the text that are derived from “sense” etc.
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4 mins
+ feedback
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Fluency Development
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Use only known wds and grammatical features and preferably familiar content knowledge. Allow ss to control the task and help them to plan. Ss should be interested in the message they are sending or receiving, time pressure, competition (with own earlier performance or with others, or opportunity to repeat a task.
Reading texts several hundred wds long..
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Writing
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Meaning-Focused Output
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Provide definitions, synonyms or L1 translations of the targeted wds and ask ss to find the wds in the text that match
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10 mins
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Form-Focused Learning
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Ss write wds ending in a Schwa. E.g., mother, powder, father etc.
Give wds which share the same spelling features but may be pronounced differently, e.g. guess, magic, gym, gift
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2-3 mins
+ feedback
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Fluency Development
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Use only known wds and grammatical features and preferably familiar content knowledge. Allow ss to control the task and help them to plan. Ss should be interested in the message they are sending or receiving, time pressure, competition (with own earlier performance or with others, or opportunity to repeat a task.
Writing texts several hundred wds long.
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May vary
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Speaking
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Meaning-Focused Output
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Ss construct a story from the list, either choose 12 from 20 wds or use next ws in the list to continue the story
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10 mins
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Form-Focused Learning
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Give wds which share the same spelling features but may be pronounced differently, e.g. guess, magic, gym, gift
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2-3 mins
+ feedback
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Fluency-Development
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Use only known wds and grammatical features and preferably familiar content knowledge. Allow ss to control the task and help them to plan. Ss should be interested in the message they are sending or receiving, time pressure, competition (with own earlier performance or with others, or opportunity to repeat a task.
Speaking for several minutes.
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May vary
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