Vocabulary Load Research Articles

Vocabulary Load on Two Mainstream Indonesian Textbooks for Foreign Learners: A Comparative Study

Vocabulary Load on Two Mainstream Indonesian Textbooks for Foreign Learners: A Comparative Study

Academic Vocabulary in Teacher Talk: Challenges and Opportunities for Pedagogy

This article focuses on the opportunities and challenges afforded by teacher talk in Grade Six (10 and 11 year old students) English as an Additional Language, Maths, and Science classes in an international school context in Germany. Teachers recorded their classroom discourse for one week of classes three times in one academic year in each subject. The data shows that high frequency vocabulary prevails in all three subject areas, and Science has a higher vocabulary load than the other two subjects overall. The amount of academic vocabulary, measured by Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List, and science vocabulary, measured by Coxhead & Hirsh’s EAP Science List (2007), were lower over the teacher talk than over secondary school textbooks. This means that teacher talk is lexically easier than textbooks. Over the course of the year, the vocabulary load of the teacher talk increases in all three subjects. This article looks at opportunities and challenges presented by the lexis of teacher talk in these subjects for second and foreign language students in these classes and their teachers. Suggestions for further research are presented by way of a conclusion.

A MULTIMODAL ANALYSIS OF MATHEMATICAL DISCOURSE IN ENGLISH FOR YOUNG LEARNERS

Of multiple discourses where the Vietnamese young learners are increasingly engaged to develop their English profciency, English mathematical discourse (MD) has proved to be more and more popular. This paper explores the materials in this realm from multisemiotic perspective. In particular, it deals with two questions: (1) to what extent each of the three semiotic resources - language, visual images and mathematical symbolism - is represented in the materials of learning mathematics in English (ME) developed for young learners (YL) and (2) how many words the YLs need to know to comprehend the language component of these materials. Data for illustrations and discussions are withdrawn from the printed resources currently accessible in the Vietnamese context. The results offer insights into the functions of other resources in constructing meanings apart from the well-established role of language as well as the vocabulary load of these materials. The paper concludes with a discussion of pedagogical signifcance of this study for material designers, teachers and learners and implications for further research.

Measuring the Vocabulary Load of English-medium Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) Textbooks

The purpose of this research was twofold: to examine the vocabulary load of English-medium traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) textbooks and to create a TCM English word list (TCM EWL) to bridge the vocabulary gap for matriculating TCM undergraduates. The researcher compiled a corpus containing 4.48 million running words of 100 textbooks across 20 TCM subject areas and examined the lexical range and frequency along the wordfrequency scale of the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English. The results demonstrate that knowing the most frequent 9K-10K word families plus proper nouns, transliterated words, apparent compounds and abbreviations would command 95% lexical coverage of a TCM textbook. To reach the vocabulary threshold for adequate comprehension, nearly one thousand of the most frequently-occurring word families in the corpus were chosen and they covered 19.39% of the total words in the TCM textbooks. The TCM EWL encompasses various technical, lay-technical and academic vocabularies beyond the first 2K most frequent words. For TCM novices, the present TCM EWL provides a window to the TCM register and may be helpful for ESP teachers when preparing TCM English teaching materials for reading and vocabulary development.

Measuring the vocabulary load of engineering textbooks for EFL undergraduates

The purpose of this research was twofold: to examine the vocabulary demands of English-medium engineering textbooks and to create an Engineering English Word List (EEWL) to cover EFL students’ lexical shortage. The researcher compiled a corpus containing 4.57million running words of 100 college textbooks across 20 engineering subject areas from e-book databases as the source of analysis. The results demonstrate that knowing the most frequent 5000 word families plus proper nouns, apparent compounds and abbreviations would command 95% lexical coverage of an engineering textbook to ensure adequate comprehension. Civil engineering and mechanical engineering, involving 3500 word families necessary for minimally acceptable comprehension, were the least lexically demanding, while marine engineering and biochemical engineering were the most demanding in lexis, stretching to a threshold of 8500 word families. Beyond the first 2000 words, 729 of the most frequently-occurring word families in the corpus were ultimately chosen, and these covered 14.3% of the total words in the engineering textbooks. The present EEWL may provide a window to the engineering register for matriculating engineering students and may be helpful for English for science and technology teachers when preparing Engineering English teaching materials for reading and vocabulary development.

Teaching Language and Content: Instructor Strategies in a Bilingual Science Class at a Chinese University

This research explores the role of English as a medium of instruction and a focus of learning in a bilingual science class taught in Chinese and English as a foreign language. It examines how the instructor handles meaning and form of new English science vocabulary in concept-focused physics lectures and the strategies he uses in doing so. Analysis of classroom instructional discourse demonstrates that the instructor took an integrative approach in dealing with the meaning-form association of new science vocabulary. He employed a variety of strategies to lighten vocabulary load and to increase comprehensibility of physics lectures. The results indicate that there is a place for language instruction in bilingual science classes. Bilingual science instructors are encouraged to integrate language with the subject matter they teach and provide students opportunities for simultaneous development of content and language.

Quantitative Analysis of Science and Chemistry Textbooks for Indicators of Reform: A complementary perspective

In this study, multiple thematically based and quantitative analysis procedures were utilized to explore the effectiveness of Turkish chemistry and science textbooks in terms of their reflection of reform. The themes gender equity, questioning level, science vocabulary load, and readability level provided the conceptual framework for the analyses. An unobtrusive research method, content analysis, was used by coding the manifest content and counting the frequency of words, photographs, drawings, and questions by cognitive level. The context was an undergraduate chemistry teacher preparation program at a large public university in a metropolitan area in northwestern Turkey. Forty preservice chemistry teachers were guided to analyze 10 middle school science and 10 high school chemistry textbooks. Overall, the textbooks included unfair gender representations, a considerably higher number of input and processing than output level questions, and high load of science terminology. The textbooks failed to provide sufficient empirical evidence to be considered as gender equitable and inquiry‐based. The quantitative approach employed for evaluation contrasts with a more interpretive approach, and has the potential in depicting textbook profiles in a more reliable way, complementing the commonly employed qualitative procedures. Implications suggest that further work in this line is needed on calibrating the analysis procedures with science textbooks used in different international settings. The procedures could be modified and improved to meet specific evaluation needs. In the Turkish context, next step research may concern the analysis of science textbooks being rewritten for the reform‐based curricula to make cross‐comparisons and evaluate a possible progression.

Science Vocabulary Load of Selected Secondary Science Textbooks

It has been argued that many students view science as a collection of facts and terms to be memorized. Robert Yager (1983) analyzed secondary level science textbooks to determine vocabulary load and found that the amount of new vocabulary terms presented in such textbooks is higher than that recommended for junior high and high school foreign language courses. Three textbooks analyzed in that study were re‐evaluated, taking into account limitations expressed in the earlier study. The new study also included analysis of an earth science textbook; the first study did not. The re‐analysis produced a noticeable reduction in vocabulary load estimates with only one book, Modern Chemistry, still measuring above the recommended level for foreign language courses. It is argued that the amount of vocabulary load presented is still too high and may contribute to the problem of science avoidance by secondary students.

Text‐related variables in textbook readability

Abstract Text‐related variables such as sentence complexity and vocabulary load were examined in three secondary‐school human and social biology textbooks. Content and non‐content words, technical (including biological words) and non‐technical words, rare and frequent words, and word repetitions were considered. These were intercorrelated with readability estimates from teacher and student judgements, a cloze test, and a Fry graph to establish the significance of these variables in readability. The study involved 397 ‘secondary three’ students in ‘express’ classes from five, English‐stream, government secondary schools, and 85 biology teachers from 133 secondary schools in Singapore. Ten cloze tests with every fifth‐word deletions were administered to the students, and marked by exact‐word scoring. The response to six Likert‐type items on the language of the passages was elicited from students at the time of the cloze tests, and from teachers through a postal questionnaire. Word frequency in the cloze pas...

A Study of What Chicano and Anglo Children Remember about the Stories They Read and Hear (Abstracted)

part by the comprehensibility of a message. The structure of text has been studied in terms of language variables which serve as predictive indexes of the message's level of difficulty (Klare, 1974): Readability formulas, the cloze procedure, vocabulary load, noun frequencies, etc., have been analyzed in the attempt to identify the important elements of language. The common factor among all these approaches has been the examination of the surface features of a message. However, the words and sentences alone are full of ambiguous meanings and are not retained as such entities, but rather are integrated into the context of a larger discourse. Although the physical characteristics are more commonly used and more easily measured, we need to look beyond the visible part of language in order to study its meaning. The necessity of developing a way to assess and represent the underlying meaning (deep structure) of a message is noted in the literature of the last decade. Recently, theorists from various fields have provided semantic networks representing the text structure of a passage as a tool with which the stimulus text and a subject's free recall responses can be compared. Such methods allow one to define the structure of a message, examine its effect on language comprehension, and report a qualitative, as well as quantitative, evaluation of a subject's reconstruction of that message (that is, the information acquired from text).

Investigating the Readability of Texts

44 During a normal school (lay every child has to use and come to terms with a wide variety of printed materials. Not all of these are books: workcards, pamphlets, worksheets, extracts from journals or magazines are as common as books in some subjects. As teachers we are continually faced with the problem of choosing material appropriate to the needs of each child or group. Very often the need for something on a chosen topic is so specific that the question of choosing between alternative sources hardly seem to arise. Nevertheless, a teacher is always aware that a whole range of factors will determine how well a child will be able to cope with reading and understanding what is read. Some of these factors relate to aspects of the child himself, for example his vocabulary, previous knowledge and interest in the subject in hand, but it is also possible to isolate factors associated with the text itself. It is these factors which are often described in terms of the .of a passage; in general, they relate to aspects of a text which can be measured objectively in some way in order to predict the kind of difficulty we might expect a child of a certain age to encounter. This notion of predicting difficulty is important, since the whole idea of using readability measures is to take some of the guesswork out of one of the most difficult areas of judgement that related to the complexity of prose and vocabulary load.

Sentence Depth Measures as Predictors of Reading Difficulty

TWO SUMMARY MEASURES of sentence complexity-depth of postponement and number of levels in a sector analysis-were evaluated as predictors of reading difficulty. Criteria were cloze scores and listed grade level equivalents for 80 of the McCall-Crabbs Standard Test Lessons in Reading. The Lorge Readability Formula was also recalculated, using both the Test Lessons and the Miller-Coleman Readability Scale. The two sentence complexity measures were found to be highly correlated with sentence length and similar to it as predictors of reading difficulty. The revised Lorge Formula is considerably simplified. It omits the ratio of prepositional phrases, which was shown to be an unreliable contributor to prediction when used in combination with vocabulary load and sentence length.

A Simplification of the Revised Lorge Readability Formula

Various measures of vocabulary load for 165 hundred-word passages from ten books were compared and correlated to determine the extent to which a proposed measure (word length) could be used to estimate an established but more tedious measure (number of words not on the Dale list). Number of words of six or more letters was found to correlate with number of words not on the Dale list to the extent of 0.78 and with number of affixed morphemes to the extent of 0.80. A regression equation was formulated for use of the simpler variable as a substitute for the more complex one in the Lorge readability formula.

The Vocabularies of Five Recent Third Grade Arithmetic Textbooks

Specialists in Both Reading and arithmetic recognize the importance that vocabulary plays in the readability of arithmetic textbooks. Studies dealing with different aspects of vocabulary load have contributed to the improvement of the reading matter in arithmetic texts. Teachers are, however, sometimes at a loss as to how to compare the respective vocabularies of different arithmetic books since there has seemed to be no common basis for comparison. The present study attempted to arrive at a common basis for comparison of the vocabularies of several recent arithmetic textbooks.

How Difficult Are Children's Encyclopedias? A Second Report

question, How Difficult Are Children's Encyclopedias? in essence by the phrase too difficult. They found the sentences long and the vocabulary load heavy. The eleven topic areas sampled showed a range of grade placement from 8.0 to 12.6 in the three encyclopedias. The rank order of ease of reading was Britannica Junior, Compton's, and World Book, with the medians for these three sets falling in Grades 9, 10, and 11, respectively. The conclusion was inescapable that the median grade placement of these encyclopedia materials (grade level, 10,.2) was not easily reconciled with the advertised claims of their appropriateness for elementary-school use. The present study was made to determine what significant steps, if any, have been taken during the past ten years to bring children's encyclopedias within the reading range of elementary-school children.

The Reading Difficulty of Magazines

tempt to analyze difficulty of ideas, although presenting important possibilities, has had rather negligible results. On other hand, studies of vocabulary difficulty have been fairly successful, especially at elementary-school level, and there is some important evidence to support Lorge's conclusion that the most significant predictor of reading difficulty is some function of vocabulary used (9: 231). Most of vocabulary studies so far made tend to confirm suspicion that reading difficulty of textbooks is too high as measured by average reading ability of groups for whom they are intended. Baird (i), Curtis (3), Livingston (8), Powers (12), Pressey (13), Stevenson (I4), Thorndike (16), and Ward (17) are among those reporting that vocabulary load of high-school and junior-college textbooks is enormous. As a result of

The Vocabularies of Twenty Preprimers

TmHIS report of an investigation of the vocabularies of twenty preprimers, published in 1931-40, inclusive, reveals a wide range in vocabulary in the various beginning booklets studied. The report also lists the one hundred words found to be most important and presents a study of the comparative difficulty of the preprimers on the basis of vocabulary load, as determined by simplicity of words and repetition. The following preprimers, listed alphabetically according to title, were studied. Horace Mann Buckley, Margaret L. White, Alice B. Adams, and Leslie R. Silvernale, Away We Go. The Road to Safety. New York: American Book Co., 1938. Cora M. Martin, Bob and Baby Pony. Real Life Readers. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1931, 1934. Henry Suzzallo, George Freeland, Katherine L. McLaughlin, and Ada M. Skinner, First Steps. Fact and Story Readers. New York: American Book Co.,

Some considerations of the significance of individual differences in reading

that the vocabulary load in the texts for social studies in the various grades was not excessive and was therefore not the cause of the difficulty encountered in reading such material. The second set of studies, dealing with sentence length and sentence structure, indicated that the sentences in the material under consideration were no longer than those in compositions written by pupils in these grades. Attention was called to some exceptionally long sentences, but it was concluded that length of sentence in the material under consideration was not a major cause of difficulty in reading. It was further pointed out that analysis of sentences according to form showed approximately the same or a slightly larger proportion of simple, and a smaller proportion of compound and complex sentences than prevailed in compositions written by the pupils in these grades. On the basis of these data it was felt that the sentence structure in the materials under consid-

The Vocabulary Load of Certain Secondary School Mathematics Textbooks

The purpose of this study was twofold: (1) to measure the vocabu lary burden of secondary mathematics textbooks, and (2) to determine the reliability of measurement in the methods employed. It is assumed that the ease with which, the pupil acquires the concepts of a subject is a function of the textbook's vocabulary load, and that therefore a meas urement of this load would constitute an expository device of value in selecting a textbook. METHOD