Aspects of vocabulary to consider when teaching English for Academic Purposes (based on a talk by J Moore at the OUP development day, May 2014)

1. (Developed by J. Yeo from a talk by Julie Moore
at the OUP Development Day, 31/05/14)

2. Write down 1 or 2 words that you think
would be useful to teach an intermediate
level group of EAP students
Discuss with a partner – why would you
want to teach those words?
Come and write up on the white board for
later!

3. Frequency
Collocation
Register
Connotation

4. GSL v AWL
EGAP v ESAP
Could you use a word list in your
teaching?
Could you use the Flax collection
in your teaching?

5. Semi-academic text for the educated general reader can
contain useful language.
What vocabulary or language points would you select from
this Economist article on banking regulation?
The new medicine comes in three flavours, none especially
palatable to bankers. All regulators are set to administer at
least one, but some insist on two or even all three. The
choices are higher capital and liquidity rules; restrictions on
activities such as trading for their own profit; and structural
changes such as forcing banks to “ring-fence” their retail
banks from their trading businesses or to reorganise global
businesses into national subsidiaries. (The Economist, 2013)

6. The University of Nottingham has an Academic Word
List highlighter that might help you decide which
vocabulary to select.
The highlighter allows you to paste selected text to
identify words found in the AWL.

7. BNC v BAWE
How might these words collocate in general or
academic English:
argue poor manage table
The Flax Learning Collocations search tool can
highlight some differences

8. Helping students make informed choices to be
accepted as members of an academic community:
For speaking (recent seminar contributions):
“That’s all I got.”
“You are wasting time.”
“Now you want to talk.”
“Talk man, say something.”
For writing (from a history essay):
“Hitler had a bee in his bonnet about the Jews”

9. From the Economist article on banking rules, compare…
Swiss banks such as UBS and Credit Suisse may have a
particularly jaundiced view of regulation… Their central bank
and regulator have made it clear that they would like the
country’s two big banks to shrink and to trim their investment-
banking arms. Yet the Swiss capital requirements that seemed
so shocking when they were first introduced in 2010 now seem
much less outlandish as regulators the world over consider
imposing similarly high capital standards or other draconian
rules. (‘The bite is worse than the bark’ The Economist, 2011)

10. …with an academic paper on the same topic:
We focus on the problem of regulatory design, taking as
given the government's role as a provider of deposit
insurance. We take the failure of a bank to be socially
costly, and assume that government involvement in the
provision of deposit insurance is itself socially costly.
Central to our model is an information asymmetry due to
the bank's private information about its costs of
operation (adverse selection) and about hidden actions
that bankers can take to increase their personal well
being at the bank's expense (moral hazard).
(Giammarino, Lewis; & Sappington, 1993, ‘An Incentive
Approach to Banking Regulation’, The Journal of Finance, 48/4)

11. What kinds of topics are you sensitive about
discussing in class?
P
A
R
S
N
I
P

12. Politics
Alcohol
Religion
Sex
Narcotics
Isms
Pork

13. Sometimes the hidden emotion of words is discussed in class – e.g.
with weight:
Slim / thin / skinny
Plump / fat / obese
We encourage use of synonyms for paraphrase, but a thesaurus
can be a false friend for second-language speakers:
Argue / poor / disabled
Sometimes the problem can be changing conventions of suitable
language. Can you date common use of the following terms:
Mentally retarded
Mentally handicapped
People with learning difficulties

14. Look back at the words you wrote on the board.
Discuss with a partner if you have any further
thoughts on how you would teach them for EAP
considering:
Frequency
Collocation
Register
Connotation

15. GSL: Centre for Independent Language Learning (2009). English
Vocabulary - General Service List. The Hong Kong Polytechnic
University. http://www2.elc.polyu.edu.hk/cill/generalServiceList.htm
AWL: SCHOOL OF LINGUISTICS AND APPLIED LANGUAGE STUDIES
(2011). The Academic Word List. Victoria University of Wellington
https://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/resources/academicwordlist/informati
on
AWL text highlighter: Haywood, S, (N.D.). The AWL Highlighter.
Nottingham University.
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/alzsh3/acvocab/index.htm
Flax library of resources:
http://flax.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax?a=fp&sa=library