Sophia SkoufakiUniversity of Essex · Department of Language and Linguistics
Sophia Skoufaki
PhD University of Cambridge
About
40
Publications
7,304
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108
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Sophia is an associate supervisor in the Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex. Her current research has two strands: academic vocabulary learning and coherence in writing.
Previously she worked as a lecturer in the same department, at the University of Greenwich and at the Open University in the UK and as a postdoctoral research fellow at National Taiwan University.
Publications
Publications (40)
Two accounts have been given for the formation of idiom transparency intuitions. For most
researchers, an idiom is transparent to the degree that a link can be found between its form and
meaning. Cognitive linguists agree with the aforementioned view, but claim there is an additional
source of transparency intuitions. They claim that transparency i...
This article examines the claim of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) that violations of RST diagram formation principles indicate coherence breaks. In doing so, this article makes a significant contribution to the testing of RST. More broadly, it indicates that examining the coherence-break identification potential of coherence theories could help...
Academic vocabulary knowledge predicts students' academic achievement across educational levels. English academic vocabulary knowledge is especially valuable because English is used in academia worldwide. Therefore, examining the factors that can predict English academic vocabulary knowledge can inform pedagogy, thus indirectly boosting students' c...
Teaching materials developed in-house are commonly used in EAP courses; however, research on their linguistic content, which can have important pedagogical implications, is scarce. This study examines the occurrence and repetition of general academic vocabulary, operationalised as the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) (Gardner & Davies, 2014), in the...
The Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) (Gardner & Davies, 2014) is a valuable resource for EAP teachers and students as it identifies potential lexical learning/teaching targets. This study enhances the AVL's pedagogical usefulness by identifying polysemous lemmas in it. Polysemous AVL lemmas are operationalised as those with more than one definition i...
Knowledge of academic vocabulary (i.e., vocabulary used in academic writing and speech across disciplines) has been found to predict students’ performance in both writing and reading tasks across educational levels (i.e., primary, secondary and higher education). Research into English academic vocabulary is particularly valuable because a) English...
This chapter discusses recent advances in English academic vocabulary research. It subsequently points out research topics with implications for English academic vocabulary teaching across educational levels.
Knowledge of academic vocabulary (i.e., vocabulary used in academic writing and speech across disciplines) has been found to predict students’ performance in both writing and reading tasks across educational levels (i.e., primary, secondary and higher education). Research into English academic vocabulary is particularly valuable because a) English...
Competent use of academic vocabulary by students is of critical importance for production of academic texts that respond to the discursive and generic expectations of their disciplinary contexts. Among the challenges students face in the effective production of academic texts is their use of polysemous words. To date, research on how students engag...
Academic vocabulary instruction can be beneficial to students in EMI universities since academic vocabulary knowledge predicts performance in academic tasks. With the aim to inform EAP materials design, this study examines the occurrence and repetition of high-frequency academic vocabulary in the printed teaching materials used in a presessional EA...
Inferring the meaning of unknown vocabulary from context was first proposed as an effective L1 vocabulary learning technique in the 1980s. Since then, this proposal has been modified many times. In Applied Cognitive Linguistics (ACL), meaning inference has been mainly seen as helping L2 learners memorise the form and meaning of figurative vocabular...
This chapter highlights the need for research into English academic vocabulary learning and teaching and suggests research topics with considerable pedagogical impact lications. This chapter discusses recent advances in English academic vocabulary research. It subsequently points out research topics with implications for English academic vocabulary...
Academic vocabulary is broadly defined as the vocabulary used in academic writing and speech without being specific to any discipline. However, some researchers have pointed out that the meaning senses of some polysemous English academic words vary across disciplines (e.g., Hyland and Tse, 2007; Partington, 1998). Whether a) polysemy is prevalent i...
Studies evaluating EAP pre-sessional courses through comparisons of students' pre-and post-test scores have yielded mixed results. Consequently, it is necessary to examine the teaching that takes place in EAP pre-sessional courses to come up with relevant pedagogical recommendations. This study contributes to the sparse research into EAP pre-sessio...
This talk will introduce the concept of a cognate word and highlight how knowing a cognate word can boost or hinder your learning of a word in another language. This talk will then focus on the benefits of cognates for academic vocabulary learning, that is, the learning of words which are used across academic disciplines.
In particular, it will r...
Although many academic English words are polysemous (e.g., Authors 2017), the instruction of polysemous academic words (PAWs) in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) presessional courses in English-speaking countries has not been examined. This presentation will report on a study which aims to start filling this research gap. This study examines the...
Despite evidence that many academic words are polysemous (e.g., Cobb 2010; Hyland and Tse 2007), university students’ knowledge of the meaning senses of polysemous academic words has been examined only in Schmitt (1998). Examining this issue in more depth would help estimate students’ learning needs and, hopefully, promote and inform explicit acade...
Despite evidence that many academic words are polysemous (e.g., Cobb 2010; Hyland & Tse 2007; Durrant 2016), university students’ knowledge of the meaning senses of polysemous academic words has not been examined. Yet this examination would help estimate students’ learning needs and would, hopefully, promote and inform the to-date rare explicit aca...
Errors of coherence have not been examined in detail in the discourse of second language learners partly because judgements of coherence are subjective and, therefore, differ a lot among readers (e.g., Mann and Thompson 1988). However, an examination into valid and reliable ways of detecting second-language coherence errors would have useful implic...
Psycholinguists and applied linguists have demonstrated the existence of chains of metaphoric expressions in speech and writing. For example, Low (2005) indicates that all metaphoric words in a New Scientist article on evolution present cells as animate (e.g., ‘each individual cell had to be master of all trades’, ‘collaborations of cells’). Thus,...
This paper reports on-going research aiming to result in the tagging of
discourse errors in the Language Training and Teaching Center English
Learner Corpus, a Taiwanese learner corpus of English constructed by the
Graduate Institute of Linguistics and the Department of Foreign Languages
and Literatures at National Taiwan University, the Department...
The Language Training and Testing Center (LTTC) and the Graduate Institute of Linguistics at Nationał Taiwan University have been collaborating since 2007 on the construction of the LTTC English Learner Corpus. The corpus will consist of language samples produced by Taiwanese learners of English who have sat the General English Proficiency Test (GE...
In the past decade, the use of corpora and computational tools in language education has played a crucial and critical role in innovations in language education. The current paper provides a survey of the current state of second language learner corpora in East Asia. Four types of learner corpus from four regions in East Asia are introduced, with f...
This paper presents an initial attempt to examine whether Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) (Mann & Thompson, 1988) can be fruitfully applied to the detection of the coherence errors made by Taiwanese low-intermediate learners of English. This investigation is considered warranted for three reasons. First, other methods for bottom-up coherence anal...
Cognitive linguists have been exploring how giving learners information about the motivation of L2 idioms can facilitate comprehension and retention. Results overall are encouraging, but the relative effectiveness of
different proposals has not yet been examined. In this chapter I report a small-scale experiment that was set up to compare the relat...
Projects
Projects (6)
Dr Barry Lee Reynolds and Dr Sophia Skoufaki will co-edit a special issue entitled 'Teaching and Learning of Academic Vocabulary in EMI contexts' for the International Journal of TESOL Studies.
Abstract submission deadline: January 15, 2023
Abstract review results deadline: January 31, 2023
Full manuscript deadline: May 15, 2023
Anticipated publication date: June 2024
This project aims to validate a test of polysemous English academic words. Validation is taking place at universities in the UK and China.
This project examines
how many English academic words are polysemous and
how the meaning senses of a sample of English academic words are distributed across academic disciplines.
