Working with vocabulary: On and off line

Averil CoxheadVictoria University of Wellington17 March, 2008

Today

1. Nation’s Four Strands (2007)2. The Involvement Load Hypothesis

(Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001)3. Online activities4. Offline activities

The Four Stands (Nation, 2007)

Meaning-focussed input Meaning-focussed output Form-focussed instruction Fluency

Involvement Load Hypothesis (Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001)

1. Need 2. Search3. Evaluate

The higher the level of involvement, the more effective the activity

Involvement Load challenge

Folse (2006) – Condition One - A gapfillCondition Two - Three gapfillsCondition Three - Writing original sentences

Which activity has the highest involvement load?

Which activity has the highest vocabulary retention?

And the answer is…

Folse (2006) – Condition One - A gapfillCondition Two - Three gapfillsCondition Three - Writing original

sentences

Online activities - Tom Cobb’s Compleat Lexical Tutor

Available at http://www.lextutor.ca/ Test your lexis Concordancer –

select English select corpus (written or spoken, academic or general,

graded readers etc) enter search word decide whether to sort results one word to left or right

of the search word Compare concordance lines from two corpora (for

example). Similar patterns of frequency/use/collocations/patterns?

Have a play on the website – what else can you find?

The AWL site

http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/staff/Averil-Coxhead/awl/

Information about the AWL Headwords Sublists with family members (most

frequent word in italics) Most frequent word family member in

each sublist

Sandra Haywood’s sites

1. The AWL Gapmaker - http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~alzsh3/acvocab/awlhighlighter.htm

Select a text from the website and copy Paste into window Select sublists of the AWL you want to include

(from 1-10) List the gapped words at the bottom or not?

2. The AWL Highlighter - http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~alzsh3/acvocab/awlhighlighter.htm

Offline activities1. Gap fills2. Summary writing3. Read and retell4. 4-3-2 speaking 5. Debates6. Class vocabulary box7. Ping-pong discussions8. Ranking9. Twisted dictations10. Logging vocabulary on the board11. Vocabulary notebooks12. Information transfers

ReferencesCobb, T. (n.d.). Compleat lexical tutor. Retrieved October 12, 2007, from

http://www.lextutor.ca/Coxhead, A. (n.d.) The Academic Word List. Available at

http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/staff/Averil-Coxhead/awl/ on 17 March 2009.Coxhead, A. (2006). Essentials of teaching academic vocabulary. Boston:

Houghton Mifflin.Folse, K. (2006). The effect of type of written exercise on L2 vocabulary

retention. TESOL quarterly, 40 (2), 273-293.Haywood, S. (n.d.). The AWL Gapmaker. Retrieved 12 October, 2007, from

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~alzsh3/acvocab/awlhighlighter.htmHaywood, S. (n.d.). The AWL Highlighter. Retrieved 12 October, 2007, from

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~alzsh3/acvocab/awlhighlighter.htmLaufer, B., & Hulstijn, J. (2001). Incidental vocabulary acquisition in a second

language: The construct of task-induced involvement. Applied linguistics, 22 (1), 1-26.

Nation, I. S. P. (2007). The four strands. Innovation in language learning and teaching, 1 (1), 2-13.