Vocabulary College and University Education Practice-Oriented Short Workshop
(Re)imagining language learning: A new approach to academic vocabulary
The 95% vocabulary comprehension level for academic texts and lectures is the crucial threshold for university study. To help learners attain this level, the presenters combined the headwords from the 4 major academic vocabulary lists to date: AWL (570 words), NAWL (963 words), UWL (836 words), and EAP (874 words). The resulting Global Academic Lexicon (GAV) presents the headwords from all four lists in 23 lessons. These lesson, comprising 1,850 words, progress from most frequently appearing to the least frequent. The pedagogical premise is efficacy: to lower the “learning burden” and learn the most commonly appearing words first (Nation, 2006). These lessons are now open-source and available to university teachers and students in Japan and around the world. Using free online Quizlet cards, they (1) provide the primary meaning of headwords in simple English and in Japanese, (2) demonstrate their “use in context” in sample sentences, and (3) offer a rich variety of flashcards, writing-listening-spelling practice, and competitive games for individual or group use. Presenters will demonstrate how lessons can be accessed and used autonomously, in online instruction, or in the physical classroom to motivate students, assess their learning, and give feedback on their progress.
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Paul Wadden is a professor in the Faculty of International Liberal Arts at Juntendo University, Tokyo.
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Dan Ferreira Ed.D. has been teaching in the Greater Tokyo region for twenty years. His research continues to focus on teacher-training development that moves beyond the industrial-age model to one geared towards the needs of the localized teaching/learning context and the demands of the global knowledge economy.