Julie Moore, part of the writing team for the new Oxford EAP series, looks at the joys, challenges and practicalities of teaching vocabulary as part of an academic English (EAP) course. Julie hosted a webinar entitled ‘Approaches to Teaching Academic Vocabulary’ on 31st May 2012. This webinar is no longer available to view, however you can click here to access our complete webinar library and view other resources on this topic.
With my background in ELT dictionaries and corpus research, I love vocabulary! And I think it’s probably the thing I most enjoy teaching, too. Trying to teach vocabulary as part of an Academic English (EAP) course, though, can throw up a number of challenges.
What to teach?
As a student moves from general to academic English, the increase in vocabulary load can be a daunting one. A whole new register of language opens up full of abstract nouns (relevance, participation), formal verbs (derive, implement) and specialized terminology (jurisdiction, nanotechnology). As a teacher, where do you start? Then there’s the problem of discipline-specific vocabulary. If you’ve got budding lawyers, historians, medics and engineers together in the same EAP class, who do you cater for?
In my webinar, I’ll put forward a few ideas and principles to help in selecting what vocabulary might be most useful to focus on in class.
How to fit it in?
Most EAP courses are very skills-focused. This is unsurprising as EAP students generally have quite clear goals in terms of what they need to do with language; read lots of academic texts, write well-structured essays, cite references accurately, take part in seminar discussions… the list goes on and it’s often quite a challenge to fit it all into a short EAP course. So how on earth do you squeeze in work on vocabulary as well alongside teaching all those vital skills?
I think the answer comes in two parts; a) by slipping in vocabulary work in small, but regular slots and b) by teaching students the independent study skills they need to keep working on their own vocabulary. I’ll be looking at some practical ways of doing both.
Hi, could I get an updated link for this:Julie hosted a webinar entitled ‘Approaches to Teaching Academic Vocabulary’ on 31st May 2012. You can watch it here.The link doesn’t seem to work.
Hi Hannah,
Thanks for flagging this issue with us; this webinar was originally stored on a platform that is now out of use. We are now in contact with our events team to see whether we can provide a new link, or a suitable alternative, and hope to have an answer for you shortly.
Thanks for your patience,
^Chesca
Hello Hannah,
Unfortunately our events team has confirmed that this webinar is no longer available, however we do have a couple of related blogs and webinars that may be of interest to you:
Why do we need EAP word lists and what can we do with them? (direct link to the webinar is here)
Helping learners build core vocabulary: the new Oxford word lists (direct link to the webinar is here)
I hope you find what you are looking for here!
^Chesca