Jennifer W. Greene
Dimensions of Dyslexia Conference
Atlanta, GA
February 20, 2016
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What kinds of vocabulary exist in
written academic texts?
How can we use technology to
identify academic vocabulary in the
texts our students read in their
courses?
How can we make academic words
important for our students?
Task #1:
Grab an arm buddy (or two).
Talk about academic language.
Note down your key descriptors.
Give 3-5 examples of academic language.
We will come back to this task later during this
session.
 High-Frequency
Vocabulary
 Academic
Vocabulary
 Technical
Vocabulary
 Low-Frequency
 Proper
Nouns
Vocabulary
High-Frequency Vocabulary:
 2,000 word families, which cover 80%
of written text.
◦ General Service List (West, 1953)
◦ Many of these words are function words
(e.g., articles, determiners,
prepositions, forms of the copula BE,
and so on.)
◦ These words are more difficult to learn
than content words (e.g., tree, child,
run).
High frequency
vocabulary:
General service
vocabulary
◦ 2,000 words (West, 1953)
◦ Why is this list important?
(coverage figures)
◦ see John Bauman’s
website;
http://jbauman.com/
Top ten words of the
GSL:
the
be
of
and
a
to
in
he
have
it
Compleat Lexical Tutor (Cobb, n.d.; go to http://www.lextutor.ca/)
K1 Words (1-1000); K2 Words (1001-2000) ; Not Found
When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold. My fingers
stretch out, seeking Prim’s warmth but finding only the rough
canvas cover of the mattress. She must have had bad dreams
and climbed in with our mother. Of course, she did. This is the
day of the reaping.
I prop myself up on one elbow. There’s enough light in the
bedroom to see them. My little sister, Prim, curled up on her
side, cocooned in my mother’s body, their cheeks pressed
together. In sleep, my mother looks younger, still worn but not
so beaten-down. Prim’s face is as fresh as a raindrop, as lovely
as the primrose for which she was named. My mother was very
beautiful once, too. Or so they tell me.
Collins, S. (2012). The Hunger Games. NY: Scholastic Press.
Academic vocabulary is:
◦ Not part of high-frequency vocabulary.
◦ Not frequent in literary texts.
◦ Frequent across written texts in multiple content
areas.
◦ Often contain Greek or Latin roots.
◦ Supportive to the topic rather than central to the
topic.
Coxhead (2000)
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How have academic vocabulary lists
been made?
◦ Manual frequency counts
◦ Intuition and voting
◦ Computer software and text analysis
Corpus researchers organize words into word families.
This makes sense because there is strong evidence that
words are stored by meaning in the lexicon.
Here is an example of a word family:
significant
insignificant
insignificantly
significance
significantly
signified
signifies
signify
signifying
Coverage of the GSL and the AWL
of the Academic Corpus (3.5
million words; university-level
text; written corpus)
(Coxhead, 2000)
First 1,000 GSL
1,000 families
71.4%
Second 1,000 GSL
968 families
4.7%
Ten most frequent words of the
AWL:
require
income
section
structure
policy
economy
process
Academic Word List
570 families
10.0%
research
Total
2,538 families
86.1%
issue
vary
GSL 1K and 2k
AWL
Not Found
Advances have also been made in the creation of
legal frameworks for the management of the
environment, thus providing a new basis for
addressing environmental issues. The time is now
ripe to seek truly lasting, more rational solutions to
environmental problems. It wouldn’t be a problem
if there were only one person farming shrimp. It is
the huge number of people who want to eat shrimp
and who need ways to make a living that makes
this local problem a worldwide one. In this chapter
we introduce the six themes with brief examples,
showing the linkages among them and touching on
the importance of specific knowledge that will be
the concern of the rest of the book.
(Environmental Sciences, Chapter 1)
111 total words
61 word types
GSL
AWL
Not found
84.50%
12.61%
3.61%
Taken together, the words on the GSL, AWL,
and cover 97.11% of the words in this text
sample. Implications??
General Service
List (%)
Middle School
Vocabulary List
(%)
Total (%)
82.14
6.83
88.97
Health
82.73
8.70
91.43
Mathematics
79.64
9.29
88.93
Science
Social Studies &
History
79.09
10.17
89.26
77.91
5.83
83.74
Content Area
English Grammar
& Writing
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We know the importance of high-frequency
vocabulary.
We know how corpus researchers identify highfrequency words and academic words.
We know about the Academic Word List
(Coxhead, 2000) and the Middle School
Vocabulary Lists (Greene & Coxhead, 2015)
But … there is a technical vocabulary that students
need to recognize and use as part of academic
language. What do we do about those words??
Technical vocabulary words are:
◦ Frequent within a specific discipline or
content area.
◦ Often bolded and/or glossed in a
textbook.
◦ Frequently defined within the text.
English
Grammar &
Writing
Health List
Mathematics
Science
Social Studies
& History
topic
physical
equation
energy
chapter
paragraph
alcohol
graph
chapter
section
pronoun
drug
area
cell
region
phrase
stress
chapter
data
constitution
compound
healthful
data
chemical
major
adjective
conflict
percent
section
culture
chapter
affect
fraction
area
area
predicate
vocabulary
triangle
oxygen
civil
adverb
adult
decimal
carbon
economic
essay
identify
math
atmosphere
goods
In English, a very small number of words do the
majority of the work.
Beyond high-frequency, academic, and technical
vocabulary, there is low-frequency vocabulary.
Low-frequency words just aren’t used very often
(e.g. gobbet, gibbous).
“One person’s technical vocabulary is another
person’s low-frequency vocabulary”
(Nation, 2013, p. 29).
Are proper nouns high-frequency vocabulary?
Technical Vocabulary? Or are they something
else?
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Katniss in The Hunger Games novels
Parkinson and Lou Gehrig
Katrina
The Boer Wars
Gettysburg Address
We need to make instructional decisions about the
proper nouns our students encounter.
The Compleat Lexical Tutor (Cobb, n.d.) is your friend!
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Go to: http://www.lextutor.ca/
Click on VocabProfile
Click on VP Classic v.4
Choose your discipline’s folder from your CD.
Open the text file from your folder.
Copy the text and paste it into the text window of the
VocabProfiler.
Watch admiringly as the VocabProfiler does the work for
you.
Take a look at the results.
Next – Repeat these steps with the chapter from The
Hunger Games. What do you notice about the differences
in the vocabulary profiles of these two texts?


http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/about/staff/pa
ul-nation
Range! allows you to:
◦ Use any word list you prefer;
◦ Identify words from multiple texts at the same time.

The Frequency Principle
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The Repetition Principle
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The Principle of Spaced Retrieval
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The Principle of Avoiding Interference
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The Generation Principle
Now that we know the important words,
how do we make them important for
our students?
Anecdote: Jennifer learns to read
academic texts.
Classroom word-learning activities
should be balanced in the areas of:
◦
Reading and listening
◦
Writing and speaking
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Language-focused learning
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Fluency
Learning new words through reading and
listening
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Jigsaw reading
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Narrow reading
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Close reading
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Teachers prioritize using academic
vocabulary in the classroom.
See Greene & Coxhead (2015) for more
information about these activities.
Learning new words through writing and
speaking
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Concept mapping
Synthesizing
Quick talks
Quick writing
See Greene & Coxhead (2015) for more information
about these activities.
Traditional word study activities such as:
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Investigating the company words keep in texts.
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Focusing on aspects of words through direct
instruction (spelling, grammar, pronunciation).
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Using strategies to enhance vocabulary learning
(word sorting; vocab journals and cards; semantic
feature analysis; cognate strategies; word building)
See Greene & Coxhead (2015) for more information about
these activities.
“The word is on the tip of my tongue!”
Fluency activities are timed speaking and writing
activities with gradual decreases in timed
increments.
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Quick Talks (4-3-2 for fluency)
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Quick Writing
See Greene & Coxhead (2015) for more information
about these activities.
Look back at the notes you made at the
beginning of this session.
Chat with your partner about one or two big
takeaways you have based on this session.

Different kinds of vocabulary

Identifying academic vocabulary
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Internet resources
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Steps we can take to make academic words
important for our students
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Using the Charrette Protocol to brainstorm
activities for our classrooms.
What questions do you have?
Jennifer’s contact information:
jgreene1@ggc.edu
(470) 955-0452
Bauman, J. (n.d.) John Bauman. Available at http://jbauman.com/ on May 9, 2015.
Cobb, T. (n.d.) The Compleat Lexical Tutor. Available at http://www.lextutor.ca/) on May
9, 2015.
Collins, S. (2012). The Hunger Games. NY: Scholastic Press.
Coxhead, A. (n.d.) The Academic Word List. Available from
http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/resources/academicwordlist/
Coxhead, A. (2006). Essentials of teaching academic vocabulary. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Coxhead, A. (2000) A new academic word list. TESOL Quarterly 34, 2, 213 – 238.
Erten, I.H., & Razi, S. (2009). The effects of cultural familiarity on reading comprehension.
Reading in a Foreign Language, 21, 60-77.
Greene, J.W., & Coxhead, A. (2015). Academic vocabulary for middle school students:
Research-based lists and strategies for key content areas. Baltimore, MD: Brookes.
Heatley, A., Nation, P., & Coxhead, A. (2002). Range [Computer software]. Retrieved from
http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/about/staff/paul-nation
Nation, I.S.P. (2007). The four strands. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching, 1, 1:
1-12.
Nation, I. S. P. (2014). Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
West, M. (1953). A general service list of English words. Longman: London.