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Teaching Academic Vocabulary
The AWL Highlighter and the
AWL Gapmaker are useful tools for developing teaching materials which
focus on academic vocabulary, especially for mixed-discipline classes,
since the words on the Academic Word List are valuable for all students
preparing for academic study, no matter what their subject area.
One suggested procedure:
1. Select a suitable text and
use it in class with your regular reading skills activities. Once students
are familiar with the text, re-present it to your students, this time
with all the words from the Academic Word List highlighted in bold, via
the AWL Highlighter.
This simple step fosters
noticing of the highlighted words as useful language items, whilst
also providing an example of the target words in use. Students can
use this highlighted version as a guide to which words are most useful
for them, and so which words they should make an effort to learn.
They can also be taught to look carefully, to see how a particular
word is being used. For example, which preposition follows symbol?
Is the verb commission used in an active or passive structure?
Which adjective is used with the noun factor? Dictionary study
and analysis of concordance lines can extend this by providing further
examples of the word in context, allowing students to determine how
a word is used typically, rather than in just the one instance. To
reinforce their vocabulary study, students can be encouraged to generate
their own sentences using the target words.
2. Several days later, review
some of the academic words by means of a gapfill exercise, created with
the AWL Gapmaker, based on the text previously
studied. This could be in the form of a section of the text or a summary
of the text.
This kind of exercise requires
retrieval of the words learnt earlier, which reinforces memory, strengthening
learning.
This procedure is based
on the ideas of Nation as presented in his book Learning Vocabulary
in Another Language (2001, CUP). He claims that three processes are
necessary for successful vocabulary learning: noticing, retrieving
and generating.
Practicalities
The
AWL Highlighter
Once a text has been processed, it can be named and saved to your files
as a web document. If you then open it in Word you will be able to adapt
it as you wish, e.g. add title, instructions, etc.
The
AWL Gapmaker
Fairly subtle grading of gapfill exercises is possible. For weaker classes
you can select sublist 1 and 2 only and opt for a list of extracted words
to be added. For stronger classes, you can use all sublists, which will
result in more gaps, and remove the criblist, thus making a more challenging
exercise from the same original text. Save and adapt as above.
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