In my previous job as a learning advisor in an English Department at a private women's university in Japan, I had the opportunity to make a number of 'study guides'. At the time, I used lextutor (https://www.lextutor.ca/cgi-bin/vp/eng/output.pl) to help me analyse the vocabulary levels and aimed for 85%+ words from the 2000 most frequent words and 95%+ including academic words.
Here is a link to the study guides and activities main page.
http://www.konan-wu.ac.jp/~espace/studyguides.html
For this assignment, I'd like to revisit one of them on "Which words?"
http://www.konan-wu.ac.jp/~espace/_assets/Which%20Words%20Guide.PSB.22Aug2011.pdf
It's basically a guide to help students to decide which words to focus on rather than trying to learn every new, unknown word which can be overwhelming.
Originally, lextutor showed the following results:
85% 1-1000 most frequent words
7% 1001-2000 most frequent words
6% Academic World List
So, with 92% in the top 2000 words and 98% K1+K2+AWL, I was quite satisfied.
This time, however, I used Vocab Kitchen (which was introduced in the last session), because I wanted to see how it matches up with CEFR: http://vocabkitchen.com/profiler/cefr
1. Words in the text by CEFR Level
Sort A1: 68%
Sort A2: 16%
Sort B1: 4%
Sort B2: 5%
Sort C1: 0%
Sort C2: 0%
So, with 84% A1-A2, and 93% A1-B2, I'm also quite happy, especially since most of the 8% offlist words are numbers.
However, I can still find room for improvement from a vocabulary perspective:
1. I could replace "e.g."(which most students don't know in Japan) with the more familiar 'Ex' or 'For example'.
2. 'modules' can be removed
3. 'multiple' in 'multiple meanings' can be changed to 'more than one meaning'
Please note: All the guides and activities are freely downloadable and photocopiable but I would welcome any feedback from you, other teachers and, most importantly, students. Thank you in advance.
http://www.konan-wu.ac.jp/~espace/studyguides.html
Wow! That's a lot of material! Thank you so much for sharing the link to them all, they will definitely prove of great use. In the activity you shared, I really like the fact that you encourage students to do some critical thinking before deciding on which words to study. I think it helps them realise that memorizing lists of words, especially of a more advanced level, is not the key and it reinforces the idea of being able to use vocabulary in context.
ReplyDeleteMaria Theologidou Thank you Maria.
ReplyDelete"A smart person learns from their mistakes. A wise person learns from other people's too."
When I learned Japanese as a uni student, I typically fell into the trap of writing down and looking up every word I didn't know. It was exhausting and time-consuming, and the the returns were very low compared to when I started to use flashcards and other techniques more consistently and effectively, e.g. mnemonics.
So, having gone through that, I've always told my students that I'd like my students to be able to learn from my mistakes, too!
"And don't just work harder - work smarter!"
Hi Phil,
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing your materials for week 2 and for sharing the link to these wonderful materials that participants will be downloading like crazy, I’m sure.
I’m concentrating on the one particular worksheet you went back to.
First of all - this is highly original and is an excellent resource for studnets in certain contexts who really need to get their head around which academic words to use, etc.
After looking at it and thinking about all the useful and interetsing information in it, I’ve concluded that think this would make a really good poster – the second part (summary) already forms the basis of an attractive infograph – by adding some of the other information and thinking about about the overall design it could be made into a brilliant classroom poster. / study aid.
I think it needs to be big and bold and, above all, seen by lots and lots of language learners.
Katherine Bilsborough Thanks for the positive feedback and great poster idea. I don't teacher there anymore (as I left Japan in 2014) but will past it onto my former colleagues! There are B5 photocopies that students can freely take but they generally don't unless directed to it by a learning advisor, so a poster sounds like a better option!
ReplyDeleteHow much do I love "Which words?" — A lot! It's a more refined and polished version of information that I give my more advanced students. One thing that you could include is that the NGSL (I'm sure you know Charles Brown) is on Quizlet, and you can study them in 50 word 'chunks'. There's also an excel file that has a ton on information and multiple language translations. You can find that at the link I added. I'd definitely turn the students on to the quizlet sets (no work for you - 'fun' for the students).
ReplyDeletenewgeneralservicelist.org - New General Service List
Thanks, Michael Free, for the positive feedback excellent suggestion and reminder.
ReplyDeleteYes, the work they've done with the NGSL is great and I keep hearing positive feedback on Quizlet from students as well as teacher, so should revisit and consider how to include them. Need more time but should get back to this.
In the meantime, if you'd like the original file, I can send it through if you want to adapt it.