Abstract
Recent years have seen the increasing use of vocabulary frequency lists such as 'the 1,000 most frequent words in English' to assess the difficulty of reading texts, as well as the development of learners' language. This paper reports on a longitudinal study of university essays in English, written every ten weeks under examination conditions, over a period of two years by 42 Arabic-speaking students. The expectation was that students’ use of academic vocabulary would begin with those words used most frequently in academic English and, as their vocabulary developed, draw increasingly from less commonly-used words. The evidence from this study of written output suggests that the frequency lists, which are based on academic usage by (near-)native users of English, may not be as applicable as thought for modelling the development of vocabulary use in learners of English as a second or foreign language.
Highlights
Students using English as a second language (L2) entering foundation programmes in Gulf universities tend to have one common problem: how to improve their language proficiency
The University Word List (UWL) comprises words which do not appear in the other lists and are more common in university/upper secondary contexts than in everyday contexts. 70-80% of a typical text in an academic textbook or newspaper consists of general words from the K1 list, with perhaps 5-12% from the K2 list and a similar range from the UWL
A repeated measures ANOVA shows that the percentage of Academic Word List (AWL) types increased significantly across the essays, over two years (Greenhouse-Geisser correction applied, ε = .68): Advanced Types (AWL, no outlier): F(4.052, 153.961) = 16.783 (p < .001)
Summary
Students using English as a second language (L2) entering foundation programmes in Gulf universities tend to have one common problem: how to improve their language proficiency. One aspect of the pursuit of increased proficiency is vocabulary acquisition, which is made all the more difficult, post-foundation, by the challenges of the reading texts prescribed and the level of writing required. Students face substantial challenges: to continue to increase proficiency in general English, to expand their general and academic vocabulary and, at the same time, to apply their developing knowledge of English in the pursuit of their chosen discipline. Laufer & Nation (1995), on the basis of wordlists developed by Xue and Nation (1984), developed their Lexical Frequency Profile (LFP) on the premise that an L2 user’s richness of vocabulary is reflected in the number of words used from four frequency bands (derived from typical texts such as novels or academic textbooks). The UWL comprises words which do not appear in the other lists and are more common in university/upper secondary contexts than in everyday contexts. 70-80% of a typical text in an academic textbook or newspaper consists of general words from the K1 list, with perhaps 5-12% from the K2 list and a similar range from the UWL (the relative proportions depending on how ‘academic’ the text is)
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