Averil Coxhead’s research while affiliated with Victoria University of Wellington and other places

Second language (L2) learners stand to gain substantially from mastering a wide range of multiword expressions (MWEs), and several studies have examined the benefits of language courses that regularly draw learners’ attention to MWEs. However, most of these studies focused on the learners’ retention of the MWEs included in the course materials and did not examine a potential broader and longer term effect. In the present study, upper‐intermediate students of English ( N = 54) attended extracurricular classes over the course of 11 weeks (40 minutes per week) in which they either extracted MWEs from texts or engaged only in content‐related activities. Outside the context of the experiment, the students occasionally wrote essays as part of their regular L2 curriculum. One of these essays was collected before the intervention, another shortly afterward, and a third 5 months later. Three coders independently identified MWEs in these essays. Both postcourse essays written by the students who had focused on MWEs were found to be richer in MWEs than those written by the comparison group. The difference was only in part due to a greater use of items encountered in the course texts, suggesting a broader and longer term effect on the students’ autonomous acquisition of MWEs.

This paper reports on the creation of specialized word lists in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), which is a discipline using vocabulary across languages (i.e., Chinese and English) and involves learners with different L1 backgrounds. First, a TCM Word List of 2,778 specialized words was established from corpora of TCM textbooks and journal articles. Selection criteria included specialized meaning, keyness in a corpus of general written English compared to the TCM Corpora, and frequency. The resulting TCM list covered 36.65% of the TCM Corpora but had low coverage over corpora of general written English and medical English. The TCM Word List was then divided into three sub-lists based on frequency, and graded into three levels. Level 1 contains high-frequency lexical items in English (e.g., organ, coating); Level 2 contains items that are mid-, low-frequency, or beyond any frequency levels (e.g., pericarpium, metabolism); and Level 3 contains Chinese loan words (e.g., qi, yang). Last, there is an overlap of 309 word families between this list and an earlier TCM list by Hsu (2018), which excludes words from the 1st-3rd 1,000 word families in English. Suggestions for teachers and future research are provided.

International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) standard phraseology is an integral element of aviation radiotelephony (two-way radio) communication between air traffic controllers and other aviation personnel. A key issue with standard phraseology in this context is uncertainty as to its role. This is important in the aviation setting as miscommunication can lead to accidents. This paper presents a corpus-based Tower Aviation Radiotelephony Technical Vocabulary List (TARTVL) that is derived from ICAO standard phraseology. The list includes: technical words e.g. taxiway, proper noun classifications e.g. aircraft type, number classifications e.g. headings, acronyms e.g. FOD (Foreign Object Debris) and multiword units e.g. lineup and wait. Evaluation of the list shows that it is a promising training tool. The article discusses how the TARTVL can be used by English for specific purposes (ESP) and content instructors to provide aviation radiotelephony language training for ab initio, first language and non-native English speaking aviation personnel. Such training could help reduce miscommunication in multilingual workplaces, thus enhancing safety in aviation.

The Challenge Foreign language learners should learn the words that are most useful for them. Information from various sources (corpora, teachers, and learners) has been used to identify these words. One question that arises is to what extent these data sets correlate to one another. This study aims to address this question.

Language use in vocational education is a little studied area. The Language in Trades Education project investigated the complexity of this language using a multi-pronged approach. It involved an examination of written and spoken texts in four trades at the Wellington Institute of Technology (WelTec), an Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ) Polytechnic (ITP). The study centred firstly on gathering written texts used in two construction trades (carpentry and plumbing) and two engineering trades (automotive technology and fabrication). Secondly, the spoken language of tutors and learners in these trades from classroom, building sites, and workshops was also collected. In this chapter, we share our findings related to the writing and talk in this context, the multimodal texts that students read and write, and the vocabulary used in these texts. We also discuss the translation of technical vocabulary in each trade from English to Tongan, a language of the Pacific, using a Pacific research methodology called Talanoa. Taken together, the findings from the project illustrate the complexities of language use in vocational education and have practical applications for teaching and learning.KeywordsVocational education and training (VET)Language in the tradesInstitute of technology or polytechnic (ITP)Tongan languagePractice-based learning

Word lists play a critical role in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) teaching and learning, and recent developments include lists of academic collocations (e.g., vast majority, ultimate goal ). There is however still a gap in evaluating lists focusing on a similar group of lexis. This paper evaluates two lists of academic collocations by Ackermann and Chen (2013) and Lei and Liu (2018) using three different methods: applying an evaluation framework adapted from Nation (2016) , comparing the lexical constituents, and analysing the lexical coverage. The evaluation results give implications for EAP teachers to select the list that best suits their needs. By modelling the practice of evaluating word lists, this study highlights the importance of this work and encourages similar attempts in wordlist development studies.

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.

Rugby union is played by first and second language speakers of English in many countries. Rugby has its own technical vocabulary (e.g., ruck, inside pass) and its knowledge is crucial for joining the rugby community. This article reports on a study into the nature and knowledge of technical vocabulary in spoken rugby discourse through identifying technical vocabulary and developing both single and multiword word lists. This study involved the creation of a spoken rugby corpus (61,295 running words) and a vocabulary load analysis using Nation's (2012) BNC/COCA frequency and supplementary lists. The results found learners need over 4,000 word families plus supplementary lists to reach 98% comprehension. The corpus analysis resulted in a list of 252 technical single words which covers over 12% of the spoken corpus. A pedagogically oriented multi-word unit list of 267 items was also created. A receptive knowledge task using a sample of the rugby lexis and general English words was administered to 77 (29 English L1; 48 L2 speakers of English) participants. The results highlighted differing levels of technical rugby vocabulary knowledge between first and second language speakers of English. This article concludes with implications for ESP rugby courses and suggestions for possible future research.