Lexitronics

Just a reminder that there are two new papers out in draft at the moment from Lexitronics, the first about the development of the Write Like an Academic course at: http://www.scribd.com/doc/19997437/Write-Like-An-Academic-Designing-an-Online-Advanced-Writing-  and the second about our Lexiclil Teacher Development course at: http://www.scribd.com/doc/19938162/Towards-a-Lexical-Framework-for-CLIL 

The Lexitronics contribution to raise international awarenss of research at the Eastern Mediterranean University was acknowledged in the EMU Research Newsletter.

 

ABSTRACT: This article describes two complementary research projects into lexical patterning and frequency in general and academic English. The research suggests that treating current popularly-used wordlists such as the General Service List (GSL) and the Academic Word List (AWL) as distinct constructs is of questionable merit. Rather, there are strong arguments for revising general lists of word frequency in order to ensure maximum utility to any language learner, regardless of specialization. In this respect, the construction of a new general list of word families is described. The article then proceeds to illustrate the difficulties involved in isolating specifically academic lexis and describes corpus-informed research which strongly indicates that what ESP practitioners require in addition to general frequency lists are complementary banks of lexico-structural items and collocates with genre-specific attributes and functions. Consideration of this data then leads to conclusions concerning the types of lexico-grammatical elements that might best serve different types of learner, and also the kind of methodology that might be appropriate, particularly for those involved in the teaching of English for General and Specific Academic Purposes.

 

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Hancioglu, N., Neufeld, S., & Eldridge, J. (2008). Through the looking glass and into the land of lexico-grammar. English for Specific Purposes 27/4, 459-479 doi:10.1016/j.esp.2008.08.001

Reflections on the impact of open source software and teacher autonomy by John Eldridge and Steve Neufeld. Published in the IATEFL Learning Technologies SIG, November 2007. (Note…the IATEFL site is being reogranized and the link may not open…see http://ltsig.org.uk/)

Debate concerning the number of words in the English language continues to fascinate, and calculating the exact number is no easy matter. What actually counts as a word has to be established, and then there are small matters such as dialect words, borrowings, jargon, coinages and other issues to contemplate. Should you attempt this calculation, you have guaranteed failure to look forward to, not least because whilst making your calculation, other words will have entered the language. Nonetheless, a million words would probably not be an unreasonable estimate. An impressive number, unless you are unfortunate enough, that is, to be a learner of English as a second or foreign language.

The news however is not all bad. It is many years now since research commenced into discovering which words are used most frequently and for what purposes, and it is now fairly much accepted that two to three thousand common word families will probably make up between 85% and 95% of any given text. What is more, with today’s computer software, we can put this to the test. For instance, it has just taken me little more than a couple of minutes on Tom Cobb’s excellent Compleat Lexical Tutor Site (http://lextutor.ca/vp/bnl) to establish that 95% of the words used in this review actually belong to a limited and defined set of around 2709 common word families.

It is pleasant also to note that this 2709 list results from research in our own part of the world by Ali Billuroglu, an instructor at the Eastern Mediterranean University, and Steve Neufeld at the Middle East Technical University, North Cyprus. What is more, the outcome is now available in the form of a very practical and compact book. BNL 2709 is published by RUSTEM Kitabevi together with a companion CD and includes five staged sets of worksheets, with a variety of tasks to help students learn the common meanings, collocations and uses of these essential words. You can get details about pricing and ordering from http://thebnl.org.

Written texts play a major role in the work of English language teachers, and it is obviously important to consider how we select those texts, what difficulties students might encounter with them, and how those difficulties might be surmounted. But what is it that makes a text difficult? These days there are tools available to any teacher with access to Microsoft Word and the Internet, which can provide instant data about texts. These include software which provides detailed analysis of texts based on frequency lists. In this survey, five texts are analysed using these tools. The data is compared with comments provided by a sample of teachers and students concerning the same texts. The study concludes with some suggestions as to how teachers might go about text selection, and how approaches to teaching both reading and writing in the language classroom might be further informed by the insights that emerge.

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Hancioğlu, N., & Eldridge, J. (2007). Texts and frequency lists: Some implications for practising Teachers. ELT Journal, 61/4, 330-340. doi:10.1093/elt/ccm051 (Accepted for publication in 2005.)

Original research article by Ali Billuroğlu and Steve Neufeld on the research and development that led to the BNL list of 2,709 essential words in the English language. First uploaded in December 2005 and later updated and revised in December 2006. Available for download at http://lextutor.ca/vp/bnl/BNL_Rationale.doc

Report by Steve Neufeld on a project to explore the use of web-based data-driven learning activities for vocabulary development of Engineering students taking a freshman English course at Eastern Mediterranean University. Published in the February issue of IATEFL CALL Review, 33-34.