Jeannegodfreypowerpoint 130621032419-phpapp01[1]

Helping students use
words precisely and
powerfully
Jeanne Godfrey
Jeanne Godfrey 9/3/2013
www.jeannegodfrey.com
0

Problems students have
Lack of /only partial familiarity with core academic vocabulary.
Inability to control and clearly communicate their ideas.
Lack of confidence in developing their own written voice.
Tutors giving help with technical language but expecting the
students to be familiar with sub-technical lexis. Core vocabulary
is therefore less marked and given less attention by students
also.
Dictionaries – they need to know which word they want to look
up and dictionaries don’t give adequate contextualisation within
real academic writing.
Thesauruses – again, they need to know which word you want
to look up, compounded by the fact that synonyms are grouped
and that there is no indication of differences in meaning and
context, nuance, connotation or register.
‘Confusable words’ and ‘key words’ books - again, they need to
know which word you want to look up and that they have got a
word wrong.
EAP Vocabulary course books – excellent but only one or two
are ordered via function and by definition they are (large) course
books.
1

Key points on mental lexicon and vocabulary
acquisition
How many words do L2 students need to know?
NNSs: Rundell - about 7,500 words above basic 2 -3,000
threshold level to understand
92 – 93% of a serious text.
Nation - 8,000 words = 97 - 98% coverage of serious newspapers.
9,000 are needed
for 98% coverage.
Size of lexicon needed for native-speaker performance – about
17,000 -20,000 word families. Nation and Newton. Goulden,
Nation and Read.
Do students learn vocabulary through incidental reading,
focussed teaching, reading
strategies and guessing?
Incidental reading is good but focussed teaching is more
important than reading strategies (Dalton et al., Haynes and
Barber, Laufer).
Trying to guess words definitely doesn’t work (Bensonan and
Laufer 1984, Laufer 1997).
Importance of learning phrases rather than isolated words? High.
(Nattinger and De Carrico, Kilgarrif, Moon, Howarth, Osbourne,
Nesselhauf and others.)
Core academic vocabulary versus discipline-specific? Both are
important.
(Durrant et al., Corson, Coxhead, Hyland and Guinda 2012)
Need for practice and precision? Definitely. Established pedagogy.
Jeanne Godfrey 9/3/2013 www.jeannegodfrey.com 2

Key aims and messages of The Student Phrase
Book
Aims:
to be an accessible self-reference and learning tool that can
be used alongside a piece of work or separately;
to give students a ‘way in’ to core academic vocabulary via
writing functions;
to help students use words and phrases precisely in their
writing;
to raise awareness of common errors and provide practice in
error correction;
to raise awareness of the rhetorical, ‘critical thinking’, and
other key writing functions and to become familiar with
academic writing and its conventions generally .
Messages:
academic writing should be uncomplicated, clear and precise
and controlled by the student to communicate ideas
effectively;
the ability to write well is not achieved merely by using ‘good’
words and phrases, but by understanding their purpose and
using them purposefully;
successful and powerful writing is mainly a product of sound
research, thinking and ideas combined with the ability to
communicate these to the reader.

Limitations of The Student Phrase Book
Covers core academic vocabulary rather than subject-specific
lexis.
Can’t cover all the words every student will need.
Presents synforms together.
Uses only the standard essay and report formats and to a lesser
extent original research and experiment, rather than the different
genres and sub-genres that exist.
Does not talk to students explicitly about how to learn and
develop their vocabulary.
 Does not cover in detail the complexities of how to use language
to control the development of their ideas - such aspects need to be
contextualised within their specific subject areas, using longer
sections of authentic disciplinary texts.

Research that informed The Student Phrase Book
Word selection criteria:
 core academic lexis used across disciplines in main writing
functions ;
 mid to advanced level for both native and non-native English
speakers ;
 rare words that are more common in academic texts and
therefore unfamiliar to students;
 evidenced in my ‘error corpus’ and published material as often
used imprecisely/ incorrectly.
My selection was checked against:
 West General Service List, Xue and Nation University Word List,
Coxhead Academic Word List and the Simpson-Vlach and Ellis
Academic Formulas List;
 my written error corpus;
 top two tiers of high-frequency written words in the Longman
Dictionary of Contemporary English 2009 and Macmillan
Dictionary for Advanced Learners;
 all other relevant and major publications, e.g. Fowler 2004,
Pythian 1990, Cobuild Key Words for IELTS Book 2 Improvers and
Book 3 Advanced , Swales and Feak;
 Concordancers - BNC , Wordsmith Tools 5.0, Lextutor 6.5 and
Google.
5

Extract from my academic writing error corpus
(raw data)
V about/generally. The UK population is generally 60,000,000.
V About/o.f Personal writing is more of your own feelings..
V above/earlier. ..with the restriction mentioned earlier on.. (cf above)
V Abundant side-effects ( too positive cf common)
V academic. The target audience can be white collar, business people or academical.
V Accompanies. The deforestation of the Amazon Basin escorts the concerns in
various continents in the world.
V According. Lupton (1998) the public is extremely interested in medical stories.
V according to. … According to Inoue Yukiko he is concerned that…
V According to me…
V According to. Mites and Hermes it confirms that...
V accordingly. According to this vs. accordingly
V Across. (over) the years there has been
V adapt/apply. Academic writing is a form of writing that students adapt to their
work.
V addicted. Being Internet addicted isn’t so bad
V addiction. An addiction for the Internet
V addictive. Cannabis is habitual (addictive)…
V addictive/addiction. The effect it might have if its addicted.
V adequate collocation. - My language skills are somewhat (-) adequate. (cf quite)
V Adopt/adapt. Academic writing is a form of writing that students adapt to their
work.
V advance. Advances vs advancements
V Advances vs advancements
V advantage/disadvantage. Disadvantages for species to have more than one blood
group is that….
V advantage. There are many advantages for students to embark (of embarking) on a
course of study
V Affect/influence. Testing on animals has numerous consequences; it influences
animals in several aspects.
V affect/reflect. In the long term, deforestation does not reflect on only one part of
the world.

The Student Phrase Book word coverage
University word list - Level 1 90% coverage - Level 11 8%
coverage.
Academic Word List – 51% coverage.
This may seem low but AWL does seem to favour commercial subjects
slightly1.
I also excluded words that are not directly associated with key writing
functions
and also vocabulary that is fairly basic and/or unproblematic for
advanced NNSs
and NS students.
Examples of words from the AWL not included in The Phrase Book:
aid/adult/administrative/attachment/automatic/area/civil/colleague/com
modity/
commission/consent/corporate/couple/contracted/culture/domestic/draft
/drama/
export/federal/file/funding.
The Phrase Book mainly covers words that are in the 3,000 – 7,000th
frequency range, e.g. analogy, analyse, arbitrary, comparable
(Macmillan Dictionary project and Rundell) and also some extra words
outside the 7,000th frequency range that are problematic for students
in academic writing, e.g. infer.
Examples of rare words and words outside the 7,000th frequency
range not included in TSPB:
heuristic/inimical/prudent/nomenclature/perspicuity/promulgate/redact/r
eify.
1. This is not because of bias in the AWL data – my apologies to Averil Coxhead for incorrectly making
this connection in my original presentation.

The Student Phrase Book: Vocabulary for Writing
at University 2013 Palgrave Macmillan
Basic statistics
28 writing function groups.
1, 200 words or phrases highlighted in sentences.
About 900 complete sentences from correct academic
writing. These are nearly all adapted sentences from
good/excellent student work and all contain accurate
reference details.
Just over 500 of the 1,200 words are then defined and
have key information, including other main forms of
the word, colligations and collocations, common
confusions with synonyms and synforms, and key
grammatical points.
280 incorrect adapted student sentences from my
error corpus with corrected sentences given.

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