Page 55 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

TEACHING LANGUAGE FEATURES OF ACADEMIC WRITING 41
reading or speaking, noticing and analyzing the differences between the features of casual spoken and formal written text is vital (Biber, 1995; Hinkel, 2003b; Hyland, 2002a; Hyland & Milton, 1997).
While working with written academic discourse at any level of learner proficiency, it is crucially important to take opportunities to bring learners' attention to global features of academic discourse and discourse moves, vo- cabulary uses in context, and definitions of important, discipline-specific terms usually provided in almost all introductory academic texts for first- or second-year students.
VOCABULARY AND L2ACADEMIC TEXT
Nation and W aring's (1997) research outlines the enormous task entailed in learning the vocabulary needed to produced academic text in an L2. As a point of reference, they explained that a complete dictionary of the English language contains around 55,000 word families. A word family includes the base form of a word, its inflected forms, and closely related derived forms (Nation, 2001; e.g., sing, sings, singing, sang, sung, or cold, colder, coldest, coldly, coldness). Nation and Waring also commented that a 5-year-old NS child has a vocabulary range of 4,000 to 5,000 word families, an average university student 17,000, and a university graduate around 20,000. According to the authors' estimates, native speakers add approximately 1,000 word families per year to their vocabulary size.
Thus, for adult ESL learners, the gap between their vocabularysize and that of NSs is usually very large because adult learners who have typically dedicated several years to L2 learning have a vocabulary size of much less than 5,000 words. It is possible, however, as in the case of educated non-native speakers, to achieve a significant growth in L2 vocabulary with persistent and consistent effort.
Studies on the importance of vocabulary in L2 writing have been car- riedoutbymanyresearchers. Forexample,Santos(1988)determined that lexical errors were considered to be the most serious in professors' evalua- tions of NNS student writing, followed by problems with discourse and in- formation organization and syntacticerrors, with the matters of content downgraded to being least important of all. Other studies also demon- strated that the proportion of core academic vocabulary in L2 writers' text correlated positively with higher ratings of essays on standardized tests (Laufer & Nation, 1995). On the whole, based on several earlier studies, Nation (2001) concluded that an increase in the amount of academic vo- cabulary in L2 writing contributes significantly to the higher evaluations of the quality of L2 academic writing. In light of this finding, it is not par- ticularly surprising that NS student writingusuallyreceives higher evalua-
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