Author Insights

Vocabulary in Academic Listening

Michael Thompson, author of Delta Academic Objectives: Listening and NoteTaking Skills, looks into why vocabulary is an important part of Academic Listening.
____ and Vocabulary. Ask the average EFL teacher to fill in the blank, and he or she will probably use the word Reading. One reason that reading goes with vocabulary more automatically than listening is that so many reading comprehension activities contain a vocabulary element. Another is that research on the connection between reading and vocabulary is so much more common than research on listening and vocabulary (Staehr, 2009). And yet, without vocabulary, how much listening comprehension can take place? Without vocabulary we cannot even begin to make sense of the chunks of sound being produced by the person speaking. Without the word boundaries that we supply when we listen, sound remains sound, waiting for someone to note where the words begin and end, so that it can transform from wave to language, from noise to message. In developing a taxonomy of micro-skills needed for listening comprehension Jack Richards includes not only distinguishing word boundaries but also the ability to identify the words in stressed and unstressed positions, the ability to recognize key lexical items related to subject/topic and the ability to deduce meanings of words from context (1983). Listening comprehension does not really begin to take place until we have extracted the words and begun to attach meaning and context to them. How Many Words? Deciding to include a vocabulary element in a set of listening objectives raises a number of questions. The first is the question of how much vocabulary is needed. Different objectives will have different answers, of course. The vocabulary needs of students preparing for the Cambridge Young Learners exams, for example, will be far different from the needs of students preparing to use English to study a university course like International Law. There have been a number of attempts to quantify how many words people need to have in order to function at certain levels. But before seeking the ans wer to how many words, researchers need to ask what are we counting?. Do teach and teacher count as one word, or two? How about teach and taught? Different researchers have used different standards for counting words, and that has had some effect on the number of words students reportedly need. One researcher, Paul Nation (2006), has written extensively on the question of how many words students need to know (how many word families, to be precise). His findings indicate that native speakers have vocabularies that can run as high as 20,000 word families, but that many of those words are not needed in order to function effectively in English. In fact, Nation says that knowing

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just the 2,000 most common English word families gives students 80% coverage of the words they are likely to come across. (80% coverage means that for every 10 words students hear, they will not know two.) Unfortunately, 80% coverage is not enough to be productive in English. Nations research suggests that if they want to really understand what they are listening to, students need around 95% coverage. Using the film Shrek, Nation calculated that students need a vocabulary of roughly 4000 word families to reach the 95% plateau and enjoy the heart-warming story of an ogre and his donkey. James Milton (2010) asked a slightly different question (and used a slightly different measurement for counting words - lemmas). He looked at the vocabulary needs of the different levels of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) and tried to work out how much vocabulary students need for each level (2010). Students looking to study in an English-language environment (EAP students, for short) need at least a good B2 level on the CEFR, if not a C1 level. Milton calculates that such students need a vocabulary of about 4,000 lemmas, a figure similar to the one identified by Nation. Which Words? Knowing the 2,000 most common words [1] in English allows you to understand 80% of what you hear and read, so it is clearly important for students to become familiar with these common words as quickly as possible. The challenge is that these words are so common that even students at the earliest levels have come across them (Milton estimates that even students at the A2 level need 1500 2500 words). But English purportedly received its one millionth word back in 2009 [2] which means that the remaining 998,000 English words account for only 20% of the words we see and hear. And while the exact number of words in English remains highly debatable, there is no doubt that the words that students need in order to become productive in English are lower-frequency words that are relatively uncommon. Fortunately for EFL teachers working with EAP students, a number of people have developed word lists for students looking to study at English-speaking universities. These word lists take those vast numbers of lower-frequency words and determine which of them are worth targeting. One of the most important of these lists is the Academic Word List (AWL), published by Averil Coxhead in 2000. The 570 word families of the AWL were chosen by determining which words were common across a number of academic fields (each word family occured at least 100 times). The decision was also made to exclude words which were common enough to be found on a list of the 2000 most frequent words. The result is a word list that EFL teachers can use to great effect in classes that prepare students to study in English. Targeting the vocabulary of the Academic Word List offers students a concentration of important academic vocabulary. Indeed, Coxhead estimates that the 570 word families represent 10% of the words found in academic texts, despite the fact that the word families are not among the most

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frequent English words. Using the AWL as the basis for the vocabulary element of an academic listening activity can also help EFL teachers use their time more effectively. It can be assumed that EAP students have already surpassed the A2 level, and so they should already be familiar with the most frequent words in English. Far better to target the words that students still need help acquiring than to target familiar vocabulary. That effectiveness is reinforced by the fact that the AWL word families are found in a variety of academic contexts. A focus on the AWL will help both the student preparing for a course in Accounting and the student preparing for a course in Philosophy. Conclusion How likely is it that EFL students will need to be able to listen for academic vocabulary? Until recently, perhaps, second-language students have dealt with English more as a subject in its own right than as a means for learning about other subjects. But the internet has already changed how EFL students use their English outside the classroom, and now it seems poised to challenge EFL students to use English for academic purposes. The rise of massive open online courses (MOOCs) means that students all over the world have the chance to take courses at some of the best English-speaking universities in the world (a single online course on artificial intelligence offered by Stanford University in California had some 160,000 students from 190 countries, according to the New York Times). As more and more students move to benefit from the advantages offered by MOOCs, the need for strong listening skills, including strong vocabulary skills, (not to mention the need for teachers who can impart those skills) will only grow. Selected Bibliography Coxhead, A. 2000. A New Academic Word List TESOL Quarterly 34, No. 2: 213-238 Milton, J. 2010. The development of vocabulary breadth across the CEFR levels in Second Language Acquisition and Testing in Europe. Online: Eurosla, pp. 211232 Nation, I. S. P. 2006. How large a vocabulary is needed for reading and listening? The Canadian Modern Language Review 63/1: 5981. Richards, J.C. 1976. The role of vocabulary teaching TESOL Quarterly 10: 7789. Richards, J. C. 1983. Listening Comprehension: Approach, Design, Procedure TESOL Quarterly 17: 219240. Sthr, L. S. 2009. Vocabulary knowledge and advanced listening comprehension in English as a foreign language Studies in Second Language Acquisition 31/4: 577607. _____________________________________________________________________ 1. With the definition of word left broad

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2. the word was Web 2.0

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