Kate Harris

Welcome to the EAL/D conversations podcast. My name is Kate Harris, and I'm the EAL/D Education Advisor K to six with the New South Wales Department of Education. I'm very excited to have Luke Nolan joining me today, and Luke is one of our EAL/D Education Leaders. Last time he was with me, he talked to us a little bit about developing strategic readers and today he's going to be looking at vocabulary and why it is important for the EAL/D learners. So welcome, Luke.

Luke Nolan

Thanks, Kate. Thanks for having me back. I'm excited to be here. Vocab teaching is something that's a personal interest of mine and something I found students really value and engage with. So, hopefully you'll be able to take some ideas away from this about how EAL/D learners learn words and how we can support them using some research based strategies.

Kate Harris

I'm sure we will be able to, and I'm excited to chat to you about vocabulary today. So we might start off with looking at well, what is vocabulary and why is it so important for the EAL/D learners?

Luke Nolan

So that's a good question. Now when I'm talking about vocabulary here, be talking about lexical knowledge or knowledge of words, which basically means how many words we know and how well we know them. We'll come back to this definition in a bit more detail later on. Now it won't surprise you when I say that vocab is very important for EAL/D learners, both for developing English and for learning across the curriculum. Research tells us that there's a strong correlation between vocabulary and reading comprehension, and there's a large gap in vocabulary knowledge between EAL/D learners and their non-EAL/D peers. So this can be a gap of thousands of word families in the early years, and it tends to increase over time.

So the research also tells us that vocab instruction improves comprehension, and we know that for EAL/l Learners this is also important for oral comprehension as well as reading comprehension. Now all of this probably is something we can relate to as teachers and we recognise. When we're looking at reading assessment data EAL/D learners, something we notice first often is that students in earlier stages of learning English tend to score lower for vocabulary, which is no big surprise. Now the good news is that and based on my experience as well, students tend to value vocab. They know that vocabulary is important, something that's quantifiable for them, and they recognise when they learn a new word, and they find that rewarding and motivating. This is helped by the fact that, um, like I said, it's sort of noticeable when you learn a new word and you can get a bit of a self-esteem boost from that. On the other hand, students often don't have the skills that they need in order to learn vocab independently and to develop the depth of knowledge that they need to have in order to decode unfamiliar words and develop the ability to use words in different ways in different contexts. So all of this tells us vocab is important.

Kate Harris

So you touched on there, Luke, about how students are often really engaged with learning new words because it's something exciting for them. And I know in my experience, too of teaching younger students, they really love knowing unusual words and the meanings and how they can use those to describe things or to talk about different objects or concepts. And I think too for younger students they get excited with vocabulary when they can put things together to be able to have new discussions with people or be able to engage in different ways. So I don't know if that's something you've come across.

Luke Nolan

Definitely, there's a students tend to have a real curiosity and interest in words. And like you said, they're interested in learning novel words. Often, idioms are really popular with EAL/D students. But I've had students in the IEC ask me, you know, what's the longest word in the English language, or how many different words do you have for this? And so they really understand how important vocab is for communication and how it sort of shapes your awareness and engagement with the world. And that's something that I think we can really tap into.

Kate Harris

So you talked about there to about what vocabulary is and why it's important. But if we really drill down, what's a simple way of describing what is vocabulary?

Luke Nolan

Okay, so when we ask what is vocabulary, it's sort of a simple answer, but when you go a bit deeper, it becomes a bit more detailed in a bit more complex. Simply put, vocab is knowledge of words so saying that we need to break down what are words and what constitutes knowledge about words. And there's a lot of range there. So what are words and how many words do we need to know? So first, let's think about two kinds of voids. There are content words and grammatical words. When we think about words, we usually think about content words. So these are the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. They give us the key information in any text, and they make sense on their own. Now content words are what's called open class. This means that they are constantly being added. There's constantly new content words being added to the dictionary, which is exciting. For example, you can look this up this year The Oxford English Dictionary added a number of new content words, including the verb to adult, meaning to become or behave as an adult, especially to carry out the mundane or everyday tasks that are a necessary part of adult life. Now, for example, you might say my housemates and I are adulting. We cleaned the whole house every Saturday. And like I said, you can have some fun looking up examples of how new content words are added to the OED over the years. Now importantly, for EAL/D learners, when content words are spoken, they tend to be stressed, so they are easier to identify in listening comprehension. Now the second class of words other than content words, is grammatical words that they also known as function words. So these words give us structure, but they're not meaningful out of context. They're usually auxiliary verbs, pronouns, articles and prepositions. When we speak, grammatical words are often pronounced in a reduced form with a schwa sound, which means that they're very hard to pick out of connected speech. This can make listening comprehension quite challenging for EAL/D learners, and it's something that we need to give consideration to teaching explicitly. So to make things more complex in English, we also have lots of multi word combinations, so there are groups of words that are acting as if they're a single word. Ah and they include phrasal verbs, idioms, um, collocations. They're stored in memory and recalls and used as chunks rather than as individual words. Like a simple example is the phrase How are you? Is a chunk that's basically acts as one word.

Now, when researchers talk about words when they study words, they don't usually count individual words, but instead they count word families. So a word family is made up of a head word and all the other forms of the words, which are called inflexions and derivations. So here's an example. So if you think of the verb accept as in, please accept this priceless gift. Accept there is the head word. And that's the word you'll find the head of the dictionary entry. The inflexions would include accepted, accepts, accepting and derivations would be acceptance, acceptable, unacceptable, acceptably, unacceptably, and so on a bit of a tongue twister. All of these belong to the one word family. So how many word families are there in the English language? About 100,000. So estimates vary, but 100,000 is a good moderate estimate. Of those 100,000 word families. If you're a well-educated English L1 speaker, you likely have a vocabulary of around 20,000 word families, which means that there are around 80,000 word families that you don't know. Now this means that for all of us, there are far more English words that we don't know than words that we do know. Obviously, we get along fine, even though we only know 20% of the words in our language. So thinking about this, it's obvious that for a great many words, it's not so important to know those words. Um, but there are some words that are very important to know. So the words that aren't so important, it's because they're very rare and they're not likely to be necessary for com-ah communication. And this is something that's very important for language learning, because word frequency matters a great deal. Now researchers have given a lot of attention to studying word frequency and ranking words in order of frequency. The aim being to identify high frequency words that are more valuable for learning English, English because they're more likely to be needed for communication.

So there are a number of word frequency lists, which can be useful. One example is the New general service list, which you can find online and provides just over 2000 most frequent words that account for 92% of the words in different types of communication in English. There's also the essential word list, which is 800 words that can represent 75% of English. Now, I've provided a link for some of these lists in the further reading to accompany this podcast so you can look those up. Now the thinking is that for English language learners, the first two or 3000 most frequent words are the most important. To comprehend a text independently, a learner needs to already know about 98% of the words in a written text, or 95% in a spoken text. This depends on our vocabulary in the type of text, of course, Um, but those indications of the fact that you already need to know and be familiar with almost all of the words in a text in order to comprehend it successfully. Learning the 1st 1000 most frequent words can give you 65 to 85% comprehension. So obviously that's really important. The second most frequent 1000 can bring this up to 70 to 95% comprehension. Now there's some debate about exact numbers, but the consensus is that high frequency words should be a priority and that the first two or 3000 most frequent words are the most important for English language learners.

Kate Harris

When we spoke last time, Luke, I remember we talked about how learning to read is such a complex task. And I think with the statistics that you just gave us in terms of what students need to understand in terms of vocabulary, to be able to comprehend what they're reading that just shows an added layer of that complexity.

Luke Nolan

Yeah, that's right. And of course, vocabulary and word recognition is just one aspect of reading comprehension. But it's a I suppose you could think of it as a limiting factor because if you don't understand, um, enough of the words that you're reading, then it becomes impossible to make connections between the concepts and create an idea in your mind of what's going on in the text.

Kate Harris

And that also highlights again, why it's so important that we teach vocabulary and that we support EAL/D learners to develop a rich vocabulary as well.

Luke Nolan

Yeah, that's right. And I like the idea of rich vocabulary experience there being really important as well, because it's about the intersection between the words and their experience of the world and the existing linguistic resources as well of course, because they have a, you know, they have quite a large vocabulary in their first language.

Kate Harris

So there's lots of different types of vocabulary. What are some of those different types of vocab?

Luke Nolan

Okay, so I'll start by talking about technical words right. Now technical words are also known as specialist vocabulary or domain specific vocabulary. They represent specialised knowledge that is essential for understanding particular topics. So sometimes technical words are also high frequency. So, for example, in the field of medicine or biology, high frequency technical words would include blood, bone and skin. These words we'd all recognise their high frequency words, but they have everyday meanings. But they also have specialised technical meanings in the context of the study of biology. So this is why it's always important to teach students that these words can have different meanings in different contexts and to teach subject specific vocabulary in context.

Now, the amount of technical language in school subjects can be quite a challenge for both EAL/D students and EAL/D teachers, especially because teaching and learning the technical terms requires often having knowledge of the concepts that they represent. Now there are various ways to address this challenge, including, as I mentioned, teaching the language in context, using practical hands on activities and experiences, ah front loading vocabulary and using glossaries and translation tools. In the second part of this podcast, I'll um discuss some strategies for explicit teaching and vocabulary, and many of those will be very useful for teaching technical, technical words. Right now, there's another category of words that deserves our attention, and that is academic words. So academic words are frequent in academic texts across disciplines and are infrequent in non-academic texts. Academic vocabulary is not often encountered outside school, and it's often abstract and represents concepts and ways of thinking. For example, the words evaluate, context, analyse or criteria. Now there's an overlap here with what you might have heard of as tier two vocabulary from the work of Beck, McKeowan and Kucan. And these words are words that are not commonly encountered outside of school. And they're also, however, not restricted to specific areas of studies, so they're likely to be high utility across all the subject areas at school. Academic words are also important because they support the meaning of technical words, and they're essential to thinking and engaging in academic discourse.

Now there are a number of academic word lists available online. One that I would recommend is Coxhead's Academic Word List, which lists 570 word families that are ranked in order of frequency. This is helpful because you can identify which academic words are most frequent and therefore more likely to be useful and more important to learn first.

Kate Harris

That's been really interesting so far, Luke. You've taken us through looking at different types of words and also thinking about what is vocabulary and some of the reasons why it is so important for our EAL/D learners. But if we shift our attention now to looking at knowledge about words, what does it actually mean to know a word? And what is lexical knowledge?

Luke Nolan

So word knowledge or lexical knowledge is not just about knowing the definition of the word, but it's also about knowing about the word, it's different uses and how it fits into the world. We can think about vocabulary knowledge in terms of breath or volume, as in how many words do we know. But also depth as in, How much do we understand about the words that we do know? When we think about word knowledge, it's important to understand the difference between receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary. So receptive word knowledge is required to understand the word through listening or reading. It's the easier of the two, and people tend to have a much larger, receptive vocabulary. I'll give you an example in a moment to illustrate. Productive word knowledge, on the other hand, is required to use the word in speaking or writing. It's more challenging, and it tends to take longer to develop than receptive knowledge. So here's an example, I grew up in Japan and spoke Japanese fluently as a child. I also studied Japanese at high school but I haven't used it since then for more than 20 years, right. I still have a large enough receptive vocabulary that I can understand the gist of conversations in Japanese. But if you asked me to join in and use productive word knowledge, I'd find it a challenge. So obviously I have a much larger receptive word knowledge, but I would need to work on increasing my productive word knowledge. Now this word knowledge can be thought about in terms of the depth of knowledge of the words, so that we're talking about a qualitative difference in your knowledge of a word. This can be broken down into: Do you know the words meaning and its relationship with other words or its semantic relationship with other words? Do you know what it sounds like? Or its phonology? Do you understand how it's written or spelled its orthography? Do you know how the words put together by smaller parts, as in its morphology? Do you know that the pragmatics around the world how, how can it be used in different contexts, the registers it belongs to and the associations that creates? Do you know how it can be used in a sentence, including syntax and collocation of the words with other words that can appear alongside? So that's probably a bit overwhelming, but it gives you an idea of how much there is to depth of word knowledge. And usually this depth of word knowledge exists along a continuum from you might have heard a word before, but you're not quite sure what it means to having the ability to use the word flexibly in different contexts. And now I'll just expand on one of the last things I mentioned there, which was collocation. So collocation is very important for EAL/D learners because it's assumed knowledge for L1 English speakers. But for someone from a different language backgrounds, English collocations do not always make intuitive sense. So, for example, think about this sentence, after you exercise please take your pulse. So why take your pulse instead of count your pulse? Now count your pulse would seem more logical. But take your pulse is a collocation in English, which simply means that the words just go together, not because it's logical or there's any particular rule. It's just a collocation. So this may well not be a collocation in other languages. So you can learn more about collocations using collocation dictionary and to support EAL/D learners, we need to teach collocations explicitly and provide multiple examples of target vocabulary being used in different contexts. So all of this tells us that word knowledge is very complex, and for any given word, you may have a different level of knowledge that fluctuates over your whole life.

Kate Harris

Some more great points there, Luke and again you mentioned that word complex. And I think with what you described there in terms of what does it mean to know a word, you mentioned how there's almost a sliding scale of where different people would be out in terms of their understanding of particular words. But how does this lexical knowledge develop?

Luke Nolan

Vocabulary is an unconstrained skill, and that means it's a skill that we continue to develop over a lifespan. As we encounter different forms of a word in different contexts, our word knowledge evolves in small increments. Sometimes it goes backwards. Now let's think first about vocabulary development for learners for whom English is the first language or L1 English learners. Now a young L1 English learners know about 3 to 4000 word families before they can read. We know words according to their frequency, so these 3 to 4000 words will be mostly high frequency words. These words are learned through listening and speaking. There is good evidence that we learn very effectively through listening after we learn to read also. After the 1st 3000 words, there's a further 6000 words that are considered mid frequency. L1 English learners know these by around 11 or 12 years old, giving a 9000 word family vocabulary, which is enough to read un-simplified texts such as novels and newspapers without encountering too many unknown words. Now, as we mentioned before, word knowledge is not all there is to comprehension, of course, and full comprehension might be quite a different matter because it involves more than just vocabulary. But by 11 or 12, with a 9000 words family vocab the learner could read a text without encountering too many unknown words, and that wouldn't be what's limiting their comprehension. Now researchers agree that we learn most of this vocabulary incidentally, meaning that we learned the great majority of the words as a by-product of some other task where our aim is to communicate, not to deliberately learn the words. This incidental vocab learning depends on the amount of input. So learners who read and listen to a large, larger volume of language will progress faster. Now, to begin with, a lot of this incidental learning takes place through oral language, and there's good evidence that extensive listening can continue to be an effective way of developing vocabulary.

So if that's the case for L1 English learners, how is vocabulary development different for EAL/D learners? So EAL/D learners have different starting point, and we can't assume that they know the most frequent words in English. Um, they know those words in their first language. These frequent words are essential for comprehension and learning, so it's important to teach high frequency words. And oftentimes these are also sort of everyday or basic words. On the other hand, EAL/D learners will have a substantial vocabulary in their home language, and it's important to use this as a resource for learning. For example, by using translation tools and by supporting students to use their home language in their study notes. EAL/D learners have had and may continue to have a relatively small level of English input considered their English L1 peers. So the development of vocabulary through incidental learning can be much lower, and we need to look for ways to help them to increase their comprehensible input by engaging in more English communication both within the classroom but also beyond the classroom. Other things we need to think about are how to teach vocabulary deliberately giving attention to high frequency words, idioms, multiword combinations like phrasal verbs. How to provide opportunities for EAL/D learners to engage in extensive listening and wide reading or extensive reading. How to support students to use strategies to learn vocabulary outside the classroom. And this can include strategies for increasing exposure to English and for learning new vocabulary when encountered. The way we learn words is different, if we're learning another language. Incidental learning is still important, but there's a greater need for deliberate learning of high frequency words. Deliberate learning is also known as intentional or explicit learning, and it's when the focus is on learning the target words. As teachers, we need to put some thought into how to choose these target words, then how to teach them explicitly and how to assess student knowledge. The next part of this podcast series I'll go into some detail about strategies for explicit teaching of vocabulary for EAL/D learners.

Kate Harris

Thanks, Luke. You've given us lots to think about in terms of vocabulary development for EAL/D learners, and I'm really looking forward to having you back to talk through some of those tips for teachers in terms of how they can explicitly teach vocabulary and some of the other considerations there. So thank you for joining me again today.

Luke Nolan

No problem. It was a pleasure.

Kate Harris

And thanks everyone for listening to this episode of the conversations podcast.

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