2018 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
Bridging the vocabulary gap for English as an Additional Language learners: Establishing an EAL word list
| Project/Area Number |
17K03035
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| Research Institution | Doshisha University |
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Principal Investigator |
ブルックス ギャビン 同志社大学, グローバル・コミュニケーション学部, 助教 (10610818)
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| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
CLENTON JONATHAN 広島大学, 総合科学研究科, 准教授 (80762434)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2017-04-01 – 2020-03-31
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| Keywords | EAL / Vocabulary / International Schools |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
Last year we completed pilot tests and an analysis of the tools we are using for assessing students. Since then we have expanded our data collection to additional schools in Japan. So far the data from these additional schools are in line with what we saw during our pilot testing. They seem to indicate significantly lower mean scores for EAL learners for all measures, and significant correlations between vocabulary knowledge and linguistic proficiency measures. This mirrors earlier research, highlighting the importance of vocabulary and need for further support for the teaching of vocabulary is important if we want EAL students' to be able to succeed academically. We have also started creating the corpus for developing the EAL wordlist. This has involved digitalizing texts and using a number of Python scripts to analyze a smaller EAL corpus created for this purpose. Initially, an NLP library was used to analyze the corpus for parts of speech, then an algorithm was used to identify the high-frequency words and compare these to the high-frequency words of both the BNC/COCA and the GSL as well as Coxhead’s (2002) AWL. This process was initially done on a smaller corpus to better allow us to check the results against a similar list created using the Range program.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
3: Progress in research has been slightly delayed.
Reason
Although this stage of the research has been going smoothly there were some delays in the pilot project that result in us being able to begin this stage of the research later than expected. This has only affected our assessment of EAL students and not the creation of the EAL corpus and word list.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
We are continuing to approach other schools in Japan in order to have a larger data set of EAL students who have taken the vocabulary, reading comprehension, and general linguistic assessments. We are also in the process of increasing the number of texts in our EAL corpus to better represent the types of texts these EAL students are likely to see in their schools. Once we have created a larger corpus we will analyze that corpus and create an EAL word list from that corpus. We will then check that word list against existing corpora and word lists to see how well it represents the word frequency found in both general and EAL texts.
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| Causes of Carryover |
Due to the delays in completing the pilot program in the first year (2017-2018) of the project we started assessing students at other schools later than expected. Because of this, we did not make as many trips as anticipated to those schools. We also did not use the research assistant to help with data collection and input as much as expected. As a result of those delays we will be completing the rest of that data collection this semester, which means we will be using the allowance budgeted for last year for this years data collection.
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Research Products
(5 results)
