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The assessment of the vocabulary size of Japanese university students of science and engineering in an ESP program
Abstract
Linguistic competences are of foremost importance to students in ESP (English for Specific Purposes) programs where they receive training in areas such as vocabulary, sentence structure and rhetoric norms common to science engineering fields in order to function professionally in English in an increasingly international environment. To achieve this goal, students have to be nurtured in field-specific language contexts-an aim which is more focused than General English or English for Academic Purposes approaches. To this end, ESP instructors attempt to find effective methods to analyze student abilities and tailor materials suited to their needs and level of proficiency. This paper describes the first part of a longitudinal project which aims to improve vocabulary development of third-year science engineering students in a Japanese university. In this pilot study, one third of the classes of undergraduate Technical English were given the vocabulary size test developed by Paul Nation and David Beglar (2007) to gauge students' approximate vocabulary size for general English reading. The 30-minute test was administered in class via the university's e-learning system (WebClass UEC) to expedite the compiling of results. This presentation reports the background and rationale for using this particular measurement, the holistic results of the pilot assessment, the analysis of the correlations and deviations between departments, and the implications of these similarities and differences. In addition, these results will be used for deciding on the level from which to develop teaching materials to bridge the gaps that may appear in students' semi-technical and technical lexical repertoire. In future studies, these results will be correlated with TOEIC scores of the same students, as well as the results of other academic and specialized technical word lists.
... For better performance, the grasp of vocabulary is considered an important part of every aspect of language knowledge (Daller et al., 2007), especially in teaching and learning English as a second or foreign language as "the literature reveals a strong relationship between EFL learners' vocabulary knowledge and language skills" (Al- Masrai & Milton, 2012, p.14). Since vocabulary is the "building block of language" (Schmitt et al., 2001, p.55), acquisition of a wide range of vocabulary is essential for students to perform better in listening, speaking, reading, and writing (Nation, 1993;Nation, 2001;Shinichi et al., 2014). This also includes other areas of communication and language use such as pragmatics (Wilson & Bishop, 2021), English for specific and academic purposes (Nagy & Townsend, 2012), mathematical learning (Riccomini et al., 2015) and semiotics (Hişmanoğlu, 2005;Valtolina et al., 2012), among others. ...
... Al- Masrai and Milton (2012) investigated the vocabulary knowledge of Saudi university EFL learners at the beginning and at the end of their university studies and found that their vocabulary size was about 2000-3000 words on entry to university and around 5000 words upon graduation. Shinichi et al. (2014) assessed the vocabulary size of Japanese university students of science and engineering in an ESP program and found that over 70% of the students tested were at the 8,000 word level or above. McLean et al. (2014) tested 3,449 Japanese university students' vocabulary size using Nation and Beglar's VST, and the results showed an average score of 3,715.20 word families. ...
... Without adequate academic vocabulary knowledge, EFL students cannot perform successfully regarding any language activity at the university level. As discussed in the literature review section above, there has been rich body of knowledge about measuring the general vocabulary size of the university level students (Al- Masrai & Milton, 2012;Abmanan et al., 2017;Li & MacGregor, 2010;McLean et al., 2014;Shinichi et al., 2014;Sungprakul, 2016). However, no research was found measuring the academic vocabulary knowledge of EFL students. ...
Students' knowledge of academic vocabulary is a crucial aspect of learning English as a second or foreign language at the university level. Using academic vocabulary lists could be a valuable resource in teaching and learning vocabulary. This study measured the academic vocabulary size of Nepalese university students using Schmitt's (2010) Academic Vocabulary Level Test Version 2 as a data collection tool. The participants were 62 adult EFL students. The data were collected online via Google Forms. The results showed that the average academic vocabulary size of the students was 435 (76.3%) words out of 570 word-families in the academic vocabulary word list. The results also showed that the students had heterogeneous knowledge with varying degree of academic vocabulary achievement (M = 22.02, SD= 8.6 and Coefficient of Variation = 39.1%). The results of the study suggest that English education students at the university level in Nepal need explicit instruction, concentration, and practice to gain mastery over academic vocabulary with less variation of knowledge in their academic vocabulary achievement.
The present article wants to discuss advantages and limitations of word frequency counts for foreign language teaching and ways of putting them to good use. It will do so along a review of the Leuven English Teaching Vocabulary-list (the LET-list ), (shortly also of) the author-ware A.D.A.M. & E.V.E. (Automated Document Analysis and Manipulation and Extensible Variety of Exercises) and the courseware CTP (Comprehension Training Package ), and in a detailed presentation of the current E.E.T.-project in our department, the Extended English Teaching Vocabulary-List. The whole discussion circles around a sensible and responsible use and manipulation of an amount of objective data, combined with (inter-) subjective choices, into an instrument that allows teacher and learner to manage vocabulary learning from authentic text materials systematically and reliably.
This article examines the extent to which different groups of university students have shared vocabulary needs. Previous research
in this area is limited in that it: (i) has focused on items from Coxhead's Academic Word List (2000), which is skewed towards
certain disciplines, and focuses only on reading needs; (ii) has not investigated variation across levels of study; and (iii)
creates a possibly false dichotomy between generic and discipline-specific vocabulary. The intermediate position—that broad
groups of students may have similar vocabulary needs—is not considered. This article aims to further our understanding of
variation in academic vocabulary by: (i) analysing the extent to which student writing across disciplines and levels of study
draws on generic or specialized vocabulary, and (ii) identifying clusters of student groups with shared vocabulary needs.
It finds substantial variation between disciplines, which is only slightly lessened when related disciplines are grouped together.
Most disciplines are relatively internally homogeneous, and so good candidates for teaching units, though the vocabulary of
masters students often diverges considerably from that of undergraduates.
This article describes the development and evaluation of a new academic word list (Coxhead, 1998), which was compiled from a corpus of 3.5 million running words of written academic text by examining the range and frequency of words outside the first 2,000 most frequently occurring words of English, as described by West (1953). The AWL contains 570 word families that account for approximately 10.0% of the total words (tokens) in academic texts but only 1.4% of the total words in a fiction collection of the same size. This difference in coverage provides evidence that the list contains predominantly academic words. By highlighting the words that university students meet in a wide range of academic texts, the AWL shows learners with academic goals which words are most worth studying. The list also provides a useful basis for further research into the nature of academic vocabulary.
The primary purpose of this study was to provide preliminary validity evidence for a 140-item form of the Vocabulary Size Test, which is designed to measure written receptive knowledge of the first 14,000 words of English. Nineteen native speakers of English and 178 native speakers of Japanese participated in the study. Analyses based on the Rasch model were focused on several aspects of Messick's validation framework. The findings indicated that (1) the items and examinees generally performed as predicted by a priori hypotheses, (2) the overwhelming majority of the items displayed good fit to the Rasch model, (3) the items displayed a high degree of unidimensionality with the Rasch model accounting for 85.6% of the variance, (4) the items showed a strong degree of measurement invariance with disattenuated Pearson correlations for person measures estimated with different sets of items of 0.91 and 0.96, and (5) various combinations of items provided precise measurement for this sample of examinees as indicated by Rasch reliability indices >0.96. The Vocabulary Size Test provides teachers and researchers with a new instrument that greatly extends the range of measurement provided by other measures of written receptive vocabulary size.
This article has two goals: to report on the trialling of fourteen 1,000 word-family lists made from the British National Corpus, and to use these lists to see what,vocabulary,size is needed for unassisted,compre- hension,of written and spoken,English. The trialling showed,that the lists were,properly,sequenced,and there were,no glaring omissions,from the lists. If 98% coverage of a text is needed for unassisted comprehension, then a 8,000 to 9,000 word-family vocabulary is needed for comprehension of written text and a vocabulary of 6,000 to 7,000 for spoken text. Résumé : L’article a pour objectif de parler des essais menés sur
This report aims to show how an emphasis on vocabulary can contribute to courses in English for Specific Purposes (ESP), using the data from two lexical studies. The first study attempts to discover to what extent there may be a general language of science, or semi-technical vocabulary. This type of vocabulary would seem to offer a useful organizing principle for a lexical syllabus in common core ESP courses, and a role for the ESP teacher who finds difficulty in dealing with technical material. The study is concerned with elaborating a definition of the term semi-technical vocabulary using a combination of subjective and objective data, and by applying these criteria to the word list from the LOB Corpus study of a number of scientific disciplines. The second study examines lexical characteristics of one special language, electronics English. It is a lexical needs analysis, attempting to give a group of special interest learners words they need. The study is a count of the frequency items in 20,000 words of electronics English in ten 2,000-word samples. The entire corpus is examined, but the study also focuses on the semi-technical vocabulary of electronics, comparing it with the list developed from the first study. (JL)
A new technique is described in the paper for identifying scientific/technical terms It can also be used to characterize text types At the speed at which science and technology develops today, there appear every year a great number of scientific/technical terms As type-setting tapes and other machine-readable texts are becoming readily available, it becomes attractive to consider the possibility of automatic term collection There are broadly two basic types of terms single-worded terms (e g ‘hardware’, ‘software’, ‘terminal’, etc) and multi-worded terms (e g. ‘programming language’, ‘radio wave transmitter’, ‘hydraulic power transmission system’, etc) Since terms are highly subject matter specific, it is possible to identify single-worded terms on the basis of their frequencies of occurrence and distribution Multi-worded terms are identified on the basis of their collocational behaviour An algorithm is given for the identification procedure. The 2-word combinations recovered from the texts have shown remarkable difference between science texts and general English texts such as a novel, which can be used to characterize text types. The possibility is also discussed to develop a long term automatic monitoring and collecting system of scientific/technical terms so that the term bank can be updated on a yearly basis Another possible use of the present technique is automatic abstracting or indexing of science texts
A study of semi-technical vocabulary in computer science texts, with special reference to ESP teaching and lexicography
- J K Lam