What should we try to cover when we set out to provide vocabulary input for our EAP students? In this webinar Michael McCarthy, author of Viewpoint and Academic Vocabulary in Use 2nd edition, explored how we can utilise corpora to understand academic vocabulary.
The Cambridge Academic Corpus, containing over 430 million words, offers fantastic insight into the commonalities of written and spoken academic discourse. In this week’s webinar, Michael explored the key findings from corpus data, looking at what it can tell us about the characteristics of academic English. With these analyses he established the key areas that teachers should focus on when providing vocabulary input for EAP students.
The corpus is a powerful tool and allows for the following specific analyses of academic English:
- Single-word frequency lists
- Key word lists (statistically frequent or infrequent words)
- Cluster lists (groups of words that appear frequently together)
- Consistency/dispersion (which words reoccur consistently in lots of texts of a given genre)
Such analysis allows us to see which words form the characteristic “DNA” of academic English.
Here is an example of the top 20 most frequent words in academic spoken texts, as taken from the corpus:
This gives us an initial ‘flavour’ of spoken academic discourse – from this frequency we can see that a lot of the items are associated with conversational English, informality and interactive contexts : ‘you’, ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘yeah’. This demonstrates that a lot of spoken academic English is not terribly formal but more conversation-like. If you are trying to train your EAP students to be good members of the academic community, an important part of vocabulary teaching should thus include the skills they need for every day conversation – interactive vocabulary, discourse markers, and response tokens: ‘right’, ‘ok’.
Michael goes on to demonstrate the spoken words that are statically significant (more or less frequent) in the academic corpus, and the key words in written academic practice.
An example can be seen here:
Watch the webinar recording below to find out more insight from the academic corpus, where Michael looks at the typical styles and tools of academic corpora (key words, chunks, consistencies and frequencies) which can all help to inform your teaching of EAP vocabulary.
Make sure to explore Academic Vocabulary in Use 2nd edition!