Advanced students learning English for Academic Purposes (EAP) need to develop their academic voice in writing. Lexical competence is a key part of doing that. In this post, Final Draft series editor Jeanne Lambert shares 3 ways to help EAP students deepen their lexical competence.
Regular practice of longer chunks of language
Imagine a published academic text with no academic phrases. It would sound unskilled and unrefined. Native speakers often know these phrases from years of reading in English. ESL students need regular practice with them, but unfortunately, most ESL textbooks do not include them.
Incorporating longer chunks of language, such as academic phrases (e.g., it is important to note that…, the key issue is…, on the other hand…) helps writing sound more natural and advanced. Many of us already incorporate collocations – 2 or more words that go together so frequently that we see them as a unit (e.g., economic resources) -into our vocabulary teaching. We need to add academic phrases too.
Here’s an academic-phrase lesson I’ve used with success:
- provide a list of 4-5 phrases and have students match them to an item that explains their purpose.
- follow up with a reading passage with missing phrases and have the students choose the correct phrases from the list in Step 1.
- prompt students to use newly learned phrases in a writing assignment.
Incorporating longer units of language in vocabulary lessons will make student writing sound natural and advanced and will develop students’ academic voice.
Make vocabulary lessons corpus-based
An academic corpus is a collection of academic texts that can be searched and analyzed. A corpus can help us know which words show up most frequently in academic texts. Using corpus-based resources like the Academic Word List to design our lessons ensures that our students practice high-frequency academic vocabulary. Focusing our instruction on the most relevant language for academic writing aligns with our EAP students’ goals.
With limited classroom hours, why spend time on scrutinize (low-frequency) rather than analyze (high-frequency)? This is not to say there is no use for studying low-frequency words. Rather it’s important to focus on vocabulary that college-bound students will encounter regularly to provide a solid foundation in academic discourse.
Deepen lexical connections
You can deepen students’ connections to words/phrases they have already studied with associational activities. I first tried these activities a decade ago after reading about them in I.S.P Nation’s Learning Vocabulary in Another Language.
Here is an associational vocabulary lesson on consumerism. The 2 core goals of this activity are to deepen connections to words already studied in a unit and to have students use some of those words accurately in a writing assignment. For this activity, the final writing task is an essay on the social impact of celebrity culture.
The main part of this lesson is to provide groups of words (about 4 groups) from the unit that are thematically related and then have students, in pairs, explore those groups in 2 ways:
- explaining any associations among the groups of words
- writing down any related words or examples.
Below is a sample with a grouping:
Remind students there are no right answers
I remind my students that there are no right answers for this activity, only opportunities to deepen connections. A student answered the first exercise with something along the lines of celebrity culture and consumerism are connected—through marketing and mass media we consume celebrity culture and we often want to buy things celebrities promote. For the second one, students have come up with related words such as ‘fame,’ ‘advertising’ and ‘celebrity status’ and examples such as ‘Hollywood’, ‘tabloids’ and ‘the Kardashians‘. These answers and others help strengthen ties between words and ideas.
This activity doubles as a brainstorming activity to generate ideas for the final essays, and collocations (mass media, celebrity culture) and high-frequency items (media, culture) are also practiced. It’s rewarding to see students use the unit vocabulary and connections in their writing. These associational activities build on unit vocabulary and engage students in new ways.
Advanced EAP students need to develop lexical competence. Practicing longer chunks of language and high-frequency corpus-based vocabulary as well as deepening connections to words are three surefire ways to help students do this.
For more advice on teaching writing for academic purposes, why not take a look at Final Draft.