Page 114 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

100 CHAPTER 5
level can be understood and written within this lexical range (Nation, 1990). It is important to note, however, that words commonly found in aca- demic texts are different from those used in casual conversation (Biber et al., 1999). Therefore, academic vocabulary and grammar need to be explic- itly taught (Norris & Ortega, 2000). In general, the importance of noun us- age in academic prose cannot be overestimated. For example, Biber et al. (1999) pointed out that, although pronouns are more common than nouns in conversations, "at the other extreme, nouns are many times more com-
mon than pronouns in ... academic prose" (p. 235).
Another important distinction should be made between what has been
typically called productive and passive vocabulary. Productive vocabulary re- fers to the vocabulary items that learners can use in speech or writing, and passive vocabulary represents the words that learners are familiar with and understand in listening and reading. In written text production, one of the most important instructional goals is to increase NNS writers' productive vocabulary range. A study of NNS advanced academic texts shows that they contain two to three times as many simple nouns (e.g.,people, world, human, man, woman, stuff, thing, way) than similar prose of NS high school graduates (Hinkel, 2002a, 2003b).
Over the past century, research on various large corpora of English words has identified lists of most common vocabulary items employed in under- graduate and introductory texts across several disciplines (Coxhead, 2000; Nation, 1990). The UniversityWord List (Nation, 1990) and the Academic Word List (Coxhead, 1998; cited in Nation, 2001) include 800 words and 567 head words of word families in academic texts, respectively.The follow- ing list includes only 375 words extracted from the University Word List (Nation, 1990). Many of these are frequently used as nouns, but can also ap- pear in noun, verb, or adjective form (for a list of verbs, see chap. 8).
Lists of words, such as the noun list in this chapter, the verb list in chapter 8, or the entire UniversityWord List (Nation, 1990), can be handed out to students with an explanation of what it is and why they need to have it. When the words from the lists come up in readings, exercises, and activities, it im- portant to point them out to provide learners a sense of purpose in light of the amount of tedious and difficult work they need to do to improve their vocabulary. Nation (2001) called vocabulary work "the learning burden."
Most Common Nouns in Introductory Course Texts at the University Level
The words in the bold font are found most frequently and in highly varied 1
texts across all disciplines. (Nation, (1990) Extracted )
'In many cases, noun and verb forms can be identical (e.g., access, aid, influence, advocate). These are included on both the list of common nouns and the parallel list of frequent verbs.
TLFeBOOK