An Ethnography and Analysis of the Learning and Teaching of Academic Word List Vocabulary in the Esl Classroom
Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: Within the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), research into vocabulary acquisition has attained great prominence in recent years. A great emphasis has been placed on the need to measure vocabulary knowledge of second language learners in terms of both depth and breadth. Corpora, such as the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Academic Word List (AWL), have been used to determine which words learners must attain knowledge of for their specific needs. English as a second language (ESL) programs must determine whether learners have knowledge of these words or facilitate their learning. Researchers have utilized quantitative methods to measure both breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge. Fewer studies have taken an ethnographic approach to provide information about how words are learned. Ethnographic methods can provide an insight into the learning and teaching of vocabulary which quantitative methods alone cannot account for. This thesis employs qualitative methods to examine the implementation of a rigorous vocabulary curriculum as well as student and teacher perceptions of the implementation. 50 AWL words were taught across the curriculum over the course of a three-month term to full-time ESL students in an intensive ESL program. Data was collected through classroom observations, questionnaires, and interviews. In addition, initial learning outcomes were measured by a pretest and posttest, though this was not the focus of the study. The findings show that an average of more than 2 hours a week was spent explicitly teaching the weekly AWL words. Writing original sentences appeared to be the most common exercise type. The students were generally satisfied with the curriculum, though they expressed the need for skill-specific activities with the core words. The teachers generally thought the curriculum had potential but felt that better coordination was needed. The pretest and posttest revealed that the majority of the students were able to write a syntactically and semantically accurate sentence for a slight majority of the 50 words. These results suggest that learning and teaching vocabulary is much more difficult than one would expect.
Author: Rebecca Kate Wojcik
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2127629420