Schedule: 2009-09-12 (10:45 - 11:30)
Parallel Session 5 (Room A-35)

Title: Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning
Authors: Stefania Spina
Abstract: In this paper I describe a suite of online resources designed to improve vocabulary learning; the project has its origin in the need to expand academic vocabulary of non-native students of italian Universities. If they want to attend University programs, non-native students are requested to take language courses and to pass language tests, as evidence that they have sufficient language ability at both receptive and productive levels to follow a course taught in Italian.
In spite of that, previous research (Spina, to be published) has demonstrated that many of them still show remarkable comprehension and production problems in the academic activities. This is true not only for students with L1 typologically distant from italian (asian students for example), but also for european and even Romance language students. These problems are mostly due to a lack of lexical competence: non-native students seem to have an unreliable knowledge of academic vocabulary (Nations 2001; Coxhead 2000).
The project aims therefore to build a set of online resources to improve this specific lexical competence; the core tool is a lexical database that includes academic words associated with other information (definitions, examples, grammatical category, etc.). Other learning resources are:
- a set of academic readings (texts extracted from university textbooks or articles), where academic vocabulary is automatically highlighted;
- a cloze-generator tool that automatically transforms texts into a gapped passage where academic words are missing (texts can be added by students).
All these resources, that are integrated in our Personal Learning Environment (the online platform used to teach online language courses), have two major features:
- they are corpus-based. Academic words have been extracted from the Academic Italian Corpus, of approximately 1 million running words of written academic Italian, that includes 210 academic texts, divided into the three subject areas of Humanities, Sciences and Law-Economy (70 texts for each subject area). The most frequent words extracted from AIC have been compared to the 7000 words included in the Fundamental Italian Vocabulary (De Mauro 1980); words that don’t match the list of 7000 compose the Academic Italian Word List (AIWL);
- they can be collaboratively expanded. While improving their vocabulary, non-native students can contribute to increase the number of words included in the AIWL suggesting new items and providing definitions and examples. Once verified by tutors, these new items become part of the lexical database and are administrated as new tests to other students.
References
Coxhead, A. (2000). A new academic word list. TESOL Quarterly, 34, 213-238.
De Mauro, T. (1980). Guida all'uso delle parole. Roma: Editori Riuniti.
Horst, M., & Cobb, T. (2001). Growing academic vocabulary with a collaborative on-line database. In B. Morrison, D. Gardner, K. Keobke, & M. Spratt (Eds.), ELT perspectives on IT & multimedia; Selected papers from the ITMELT Conference 2001 (pp. 189-225). Hong Kong: Polytechnic University.
Nation, I. S. P. (2001). Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Spina, S. (to be published). La competenza del lessico accademico da parte di studenti non italofoni, Perugia.
Keywords: collaborative activities, academic vocabulary, corpora, lexical competence

Main topic: Innovative e-learning solutions for languages

Biodata: Stefania Spina is Researcher in Linguistics at the University for Foreigners Perugia (Italy), where she works since 1991. Her main research areas are corpus linguistics (learner corpora and academic corpora), computational linguistics (italian POS tagging, collocations) and CALL (she is in charge of e-learning academic activities and online language courses). http://elearning.unistrapg.it/webclass/mod/data/view.php?d=1&rid=25
Type of presentation Paper presentation

Paper category Research & Development

Target educational sector Higher education

Language of delivery English

EU-funded project No

Schedule:	2009-09-12 (10:45 - 11:30) Parallel Session 5 (Room A-35)
Title:	Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning
Authors:	Stefania Spina
Abstract:	In this paper I describe a suite of online resources designed to improve vocabulary learning; the project has its origin in the need to expand academic vocabulary of non-native students of italian Universities. If they want to attend University programs, non-native students are requested to take language courses and to pass language tests, as evidence that they have sufficient language ability at both receptive and productive levels to follow a course taught in Italian. In spite of that, previous research (Spina, to be published) has demonstrated that many of them still show remarkable comprehension and production problems in the academic activities. This is true not only for students with L1 typologically distant from italian (asian students for example), but also for european and even Romance language students. These problems are mostly due to a lack of lexical competence: non-native students seem to have an unreliable knowledge of academic vocabulary (Nations 2001; Coxhead 2000). The project aims therefore to build a set of online resources to improve this specific lexical competence; the core tool is a lexical database that includes academic words associated with other information (definitions, examples, grammatical category, etc.). Other learning resources are: - a set of academic readings (texts extracted from university textbooks or articles), where academic vocabulary is automatically highlighted; - a cloze-generator tool that automatically transforms texts into a gapped passage where academic words are missing (texts can be added by students). All these resources, that are integrated in our Personal Learning Environment (the online platform used to teach online language courses), have two major features: - they are corpus-based. Academic words have been extracted from the Academic Italian Corpus, of approximately 1 million running words of written academic Italian, that includes 210 academic texts, divided into the three subject areas of Humanities, Sciences and Law-Economy (70 texts for each subject area). The most frequent words extracted from AIC have been compared to the 7000 words included in the Fundamental Italian Vocabulary (De Mauro 1980); words that don’t match the list of 7000 compose the Academic Italian Word List (AIWL); - they can be collaboratively expanded. While improving their vocabulary, non-native students can contribute to increase the number of words included in the AIWL suggesting new items and providing definitions and examples. Once verified by tutors, these new items become part of the lexical database and are administrated as new tests to other students. References Coxhead, A. (2000). A new academic word list. TESOL Quarterly, 34, 213-238. De Mauro, T. (1980). Guida all'uso delle parole. Roma: Editori Riuniti. Horst, M., & Cobb, T. (2001). Growing academic vocabulary with a collaborative on-line database. In B. Morrison, D. Gardner, K. Keobke, & M. Spratt (Eds.), ELT perspectives on IT & multimedia; Selected papers from the ITMELT Conference 2001 (pp. 189-225). Hong Kong: Polytechnic University. Nation, I. S. P. (2001). Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spina, S. (to be published). La competenza del lessico accademico da parte di studenti non italofoni, Perugia.
Keywords:	collaborative activities, academic vocabulary, corpora, lexical competence
Main topic:	Innovative e-learning solutions for languages
Biodata:	Stefania Spina is Researcher in Linguistics at the University for Foreigners Perugia (Italy), where she works since 1991. Her main research areas are corpus linguistics (learner corpora and academic corpora), computational linguistics (italian POS tagging, collocations) and CALL (she is in charge of e-learning academic activities and online language courses). http://elearning.unistrapg.it/webclass/mod/data/view.php?d=1&rid=25
Type of presentation	Paper presentation
Paper category	Research & Development
Target educational sector	Higher education
Language of delivery	English
EU-funded project	No