2019 Fiscal Year Final 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 Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Multi-year Fund |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
Foreign language education
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| Research Institution | Kwansei Gakuin University (2019)
Doshisha University (2017-2018) |
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Principal Investigator |
Brooks Gavin 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 / Applied Linguistics / Assessment |
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| Outline of Final Research Achievements |
This study investigated the academic and reading comprehension challenges faced by English as an Additional Language (EAL) learners. Over the past few years of this study, we have examined a participant group of 178 students (136 EAL, and 52 First Language English (FLE)) learners at the middle school and high school level studying at two different international school in Japan. We assessed the participants according to four factors shown to influence reading comprehension: vocabulary knowledge, word decoding skills, reading fluency, and general linguistic ability. Our results show that differences in vocabulary knowledge illustrate more variance in reading comprehension scores and academic proficiency, highlighting the importance of vocabulary knowledge, especially important for EAL learners. We also complied a corpus of academic texts that this group of students would likely to encounter in their academic studies to address these issues.
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| Free Research Field |
Applied Linguistics
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| Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements |
These results have a significant implication for the teaching and assessment of EAL learners. By highlighting the challenges EAL learners face with regards to vocabulary, we hope that this study will make it easier to both assess and provide EAL learners with the support they require.
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