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How Accurately do English for Academic Purposes Students use Academic Word List Words?

Title:

How Accurately do English for Academic Purposes Students use Academic Word List Words?

McDonough, Kim, Neumann, Heike ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8977-7219 and Hubert-Smith, Nicolas (2018) How Accurately do English for Academic Purposes Students use Academic Word List Words? BC TEAL, 3 (1). pp. 77-89. ISSN 2369-4211

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Abstract

Previous corpus research on English for academic purposes (EAP) writing has analyzed how often additional language (L2) writers use words from the Academic Word List (AWL) (Coxhead, 2000), but few studies to date have explored how accurately those words are used. Therefore, the current study investigated how accurately and appropriately EAP writers (N = 409) use AWL words in their argumentative essays. The 230,694-word corpus was analyzed to identify AWL word families that occurred with at least 20 tokens. All tokens were then coded as being accurately used, or as containing a morphosyntactic or collocational error (or both). The findings showed that the EAP students’ overall accuracy rate was high (67%) and that collocational errors occurred more frequently than grammatical errors. Pedagogical implications for EAP programs are discussed.

Divisions:Concordia University > Faculty of Arts and Science > Education
Item Type:Article
Refereed:Yes
Authors:McDonough, Kim and Neumann, Heike and Hubert-Smith, Nicolas
Journal or Publication:BC TEAL
Date:31 October 2018
Keywords:Second language writing, English for academic purposes, EAP, Academic vocabulary, AWL
ID Code:985472
Deposited By: Heike Neumann
Deposited On:06 Jun 2019 17:51
Last Modified:06 Jun 2019 17:51

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