This article considers the notion of academic vocabulary: the assumption that students of English for academic purposes (EAP) should study a core of high frequency words because they are common in an English academic register. We examine the value of the term by using Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) to explore the distribution of its 570 word families in a corpus of 3.3 million words from a range of academic disciplines and genres. The findings suggest that although the AWL covers 10.6% of the corpus, individual lexical items on the list often occur and behave in different ways across disciplines in terms of range, frequency, collocation, and meaning. This result suggests that the AWL might not be as general as it was intended to be and, more importantly, questions the widely held assumption that students need a single core vocabulary for academic study. We argue that the different practices and discourses of disciplinary communities undermine the usefulness of such lists and recommend that teachers help students develop a more restricted, discipline-based lexical repertoire.

Is There an "Academic Vocabulary"?

This book provides a pioneering introduction to heritage languages and their speakers, written by one of the founders of this new field Using examples from a wide range of languages, it covers all the main components of grammar, including phonetics and phonology, morphology and morphosyntax, semantics and pragmatics, and shows easy familiarity with approaches ranging from formal grammar to typology, from sociolinguistics to child language acquisition and other relevant aspects of psycholinguistics The book offers analysis of resilient and vulnerable domains in heritage languages, with a special emphasis on recurrent structural properties that occur across multiple heritage languages It is explicit about instances where, based on our current knowledge, we are unable to reach a clear decision on a particular claim or analytical point, and therefore provides a much-needed resource for future research

Heritage Languages and their Speakers

Existing fluorescent protein highlighting techniques are irreversible and preclude repeated monitoring of the same protein to study its temporal regulation. Within cells, protein movement is regulated by many different factors and may be altered by changes in the cellular state. Measurements of protein dynamics are affected by the geometry of both the cells and the highlighted regions, and any changes in movement should ideally be assessed with data from a single cell. Ando et al. describe the engineering and application of a fluorescent protein, Dronpa, that can be reversibly highlighted to study spatiotemporal protein dynamics in living cells. The authors directly visualized the influx and efflux of a key regulator of intracellular signaling, mitogen-activated protein kinase, into and out of the nucleus. R. Ando, H. Mizuno, A. Miyawaki, Regulated fast nucleocytoplasmic shuttling observed by reversible protein highlighting. Science 306, 1370-1373 (2004). [Abstract] [Full Text]

Now you see it, now you don't.

This study attempts to shed new light on one of the most notoriously challenging aspects of English language instruction—the English phrasal verbs. The highest frequency phrasal verb constructions in the 100-million-word British National Corpus are identified and analyzed. The findings indicate that a small subset of 20 lexical verbs combines with eight adverbial particles (160 combinations) to account for more than one half of the 518,923 phrasal verb occurrences identified in the megacorpus. A more specific analysis indicates that only 25 phrasal verbs account for nearly one third of all phrasal-verb occurrences in the British National Corpus, and 100 phrasal verbs account for more than one half of all such items. Subsequent semantic analyses show that these 100 high-frequency phrasal verb forms have potentially 559 variant-meaning senses. The authors discuss how learners, teachers, and materials developers might utilize the findings of the study to improve instruction of phrasal verbs in English language education.

Pointing Out Frequent Phrasal Verbs: A Corpus-Based Analysis

Formulaic language is at the heart of corpus linguistic research, and learner corpus research (LCR) is no exception. As multiword units of all kinds (e.g., collocations, phrasal verbs, speech formulae) are notoriously difficult for learners, and corpus linguistic techniques are an extremely powerful way of exploring them, they were an obvious area for investigation by researchers from the very early days of LCR. In the first part of this article, the focus is on the types of learner corpus data investigated and the most popular method used to analyze them. The second section describes the types of word sequences analyzed in learner corpora and themethodologies used to extract them. In the rest of the article,we summarize some of the main findings of LCR studies of the learner phrasicon, distinguishing between co-occurrence and recurrence. Particular emphasis is also placed on the relationship between learners’ use of formulaic sequences and transfer from the learner’s first language. The article concludes with some proposals for future research in the field.

Formulaic language in learner corpora

This study investigates the avoidance of English phrasal verbs by Chinese learners. Six groups of Chinese learners (intermediate and advanced; a total of 70) took one of 3 tests (multiple-choice, translation, or recall), which included literal and figurative phrasal verbs, while 15 native speakers took the multiple-choice test. The results show that 3 factors (proficiency level, phrasal- verb type, and test type) affect learners’ avoidance of phrasal verbs. The authors speculate that the differences between first and second languages and the semantic difficulty of phrasal verbs may be reasons for the learners’ avoidance. Incorporating the findings of 3 previous studies, this study claims that learners’ phrasal-verb avoidance behavior is a manifestation of interlanguage development.

https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/10125/40650/1/Liao%20%26%20Fukuya%20%282002%29_WP20%282%29.pdf

Yoshinori J. Fukuya

Papers

Avoidance of Phrasal Verbs: The Case of Chinese Learners of English