References and Resources for Vocabulary Development

This site was developed to share handouts from our colloquium on teaching vocabulary at TESOL, but I have added the work of other teachers as well. I would be interested in hearing your feedback on any of the tasks given here.

From Duke University, Edie Allen writes about the work she and colleague Maria Parker are doing:

Maria and I are using the AWL in our advanced academic writing class and are trying to apply the current agreed upon principles of vocabulary acquisition in our classroom. Students self-assess their knowledge of AWL words list by list and then we offer multiple encounters with the words that are new to them using sentence writing, student research using concordancing software, various semantic mapping tools, oral activities and presentations.

Here is the handout from their talk at TESOL.

August, 2004 update: two more handouts from Maria and Edie. One uses sublists of the AWL; the other uses the students' own running lists; both can be adapted to your own students' needs.

Jan Froedesen's handout on paraphrasing is now online, so please take a look at ways of enabling your students to become more proficient at this skill. Cynthia Schueman's overheads on the give a good look at the Web Vocabulary Profiler and compare a text on a neighborhood to a text on world roots of education. She also referred to the Compleat Lexical Tutor, a link for which is given below.

I also met and have been in correspondence with Gerry Luton, from the English Language Centre at the University of Victoria. He has produced a program called "Gerry's Vocabulary Teacher". He gave me a demonstration of the program at TESOL, and it is very comprehensive. You can download a free trial version of GVT here. Having spent 8 years developing this program and putting vocabulary teaching ideas to work in his classes at the ELC, Gerry has conducted a lot of workshops in the area of vocabulary. Here is his handout from a presentation entitled "Reviewing/Reinforcing & Testing Vocabulary".

I am happy to report some additions to this site, including Donna Kiehnhoff-Obenda's handouts from our session at TESOL, both the vocabulary template and her vocabulary research results and Anne Martin's handout on definition in vocabulary, in case you missed these at the presentation. Here is John Bunting's handout on collocation. His PowerPoint presentation, entitled "Building Collocation Awareness of ESL Student Writers" and other sites referred to in his talk can be accessed here.

Check out video cloze from the Lexical Tutor site, where you can view a demo.

Averil Coxhead introduces the Academic Word list, giving suggestions on its use. For a detailed explanation of the AWL, start here!

Andy Gillett at the University of Hertfordshire offers a series of vocabulary exercises based on the AWL highlighter and gapmaker at his website.

Using the Academic Word List , from Sandra Haywood from the University of Nottingham, contains a range of exercises using concordancing and includes the AWL highlighter and AWL Gapmaker. A set of exercises (which I developed for my English Bridge Program students) can be accessed here for an exploitation of the AWL Gapmaker.

Horst, M., Cobb, T., & Nicolae, I. (In review). Expanding Academic Vocabulary with a Collaborative On-line Database. Submitted to Language Learning & Technology, November 2003. This contains a useful introduction to Group Lex and describes a study of how learners in Montreal utilized this program.

Lewis, M. (2000.) Teaching Collocation. Language Teaching Press. This book is a series of articles exploring the use of teaching collocation at a range of levels.

Nation, P. (2001). Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge University Press.

Oxford collocations dictionary for students of English. (2002). Oxford University Press. Contains worksheets and a section on how to use this dictionary.

Thurstun, J., & Candlin, C. (1998). Exploring Academic English. Sydney, Australia: National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research.

The Virtual Language Centre from Hong Kong Polytechnic University, allows students to access concordances from a range of sources, including the South China Morning Post and The Times. It also links directly to the Net Dictionary.