2019 Fiscal Year Annual Research 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 | Kwansei Gakuin University |
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Principal Investigator |
ブルックス ギャビン 関西学院大学, 総合政策学部, 講師 (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 knowledge / vocabulary assessment |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
In the final year of this study, we were able to expand the number of students who we administered the battery of tests to. This allowed us to improve our understanding of the challenges faced by English as an Additional Language (EAL) learners. Throughout this study, we have examined a participant group of 157 students (116 EAL and 41 First Language English (FLE)) learners at the middle school and high school level studying at two different international schools in Japan. We assessed the participants according to five factors shown to influence academic proficiency: reading comprehension, vocabulary knowledge, word decoding skills, reading fluency, and general linguistic ability. Our results highlight the importance of vocabulary and reading comprehension for academic success. We found that differences in vocabulary knowledge illustrate more variance in reading comprehension scores, they also highlighted the importance of both vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension for academic success. Vocabulary knowledge was shown to be especially important for EAL learners’ reading comprehension, compared to their FLE counterparts. Based on these results, we identified some issues EAL students may have with regards to vocabulary knowledge and academic proficiency. We also compiled a corpus of academic texts that this group of students would likely to encounter in their academic studies to help address these issues. We are in the process of validating this corpus and plan to publish the vocabulary lists developed from this corpus after we have finished the validation process.
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