Polysemous academic English vocabulary in an English for Academic Purposes presessional course

Although many academic English words are polysemous (e.g., Authors 2017), the instruction of polysemous academic words (PAWs) in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) presessional courses in English-speaking countries has not been examined. This presentation will report on a study which aims to start filling this research gap. This study examines the extent to which PAWs occur in the teaching materials of a 5-week EAP presessional course at a British university. PAWs are operationalized as the lemmas out of the 1000 most frequent lemmas in the Academic Vocabulary List (Gardner and Davies 2014) which have more than one definition in two English learner dictionaries.

Our study first identifies PAWs in the teaching materials of the course and then the meanings present in the materials for each PAW. Subsequently, given the important role that repetition plays in vocabulary learning (e.g., Webb 2007), this study examines first the repetition of PAWs and then that of the meanings of any PAWs repeated in the materials. Preliminary findings suggest that although many frequent PAWs are included in the materials, on average repetition is insufficient both in terms of PAWs and of PAW meanings in the materials. The pedagogical implications of the study's findings will be discussed.

References

Authors (2017)
Gardner, D. and Davies, M. (2014). A new Academic Vocabulary List. Applied Linguistics 35(3), 305-327.

Webb, S. (2007). The effects of repetition on vocabulary knowledge. Applied Linguistics 28(1), 46-65.