Averil Coxhead

This chapter focuses on the acquisition of academic and disciplinary vocabulary and begins with an overview of the characteristics of academic and disciplinary vocabulary and the lexical demands of written and spoken academic texts. Several key issues are then discussed, using examples from research in secondary and tertiary contexts in English as a foreign and second language countries. The issues are: challenges for EAP learners for learning and using academic vocabulary; levels of vocabulary knowledge for EAP learners; and the need for principled approaches to support vocabulary acquisition and use in EAP. The chapter ends with some recommendations for EAP teachers and learners to support academic vocabulary development and directions for future research.

Vocabulary is widely recognised as important to student success, yet it remains under‐theorised in teacher education, lacking a cohesive competency framework. This paper proposes a Vocabulary Teachers' Competencies (VTC) framework, based on an integrative review of consensus areas around the knowledge, skills and dispositions that support effective vocabulary teaching. The VTC organises teacher training into three domains: (1) knowledge of vocabulary research and resources, (2) vocabulary analysis and instructional skills and (3) professional and socio‐cultural capabilities. Each domain involves six competencies. These include, for example, ensuring teachers have knowledge of theories of vocabulary learning and development; are skilled in identifying and teaching phonology, meaning, morphology and spelling; and adopt inclusive vocabulary instructional practices. Addressing gaps in teacher training where educators are often underprepared, the VTC provides a flexible, non‐prescriptive reference point for teachers and teacher‐educators that can adapt to evolving research. The framework can support programme planning in preservice teacher preparation, serve as a self‐assessment tool for individual teachers, and guide in‐service professional development. By thinking through the competencies that teachers need to deliver effective vocabulary instruction, the VTC aims to enhance classroom outcomes for students. The paper concludes with practical suggestions for implementation. A supporting webpage is provided at https://cgreenhku.github.io/vocab‐teacher‐framework/ .

The New Zealand government delivered regular 1 p.m. televised COVID‐19 briefings from March 2020. These events had a crucial communicative function and were usually headed by top government and medical officials. This study focuses on technical vocabulary in a corpus made up of these briefings, including single words (grouped into technical word families) and acronyms (e.g., bubble and PPE) as well as the most frequent two to five‐word multiword units (MWUs; e.g., case numbers, genomic sequencing, and chains of transmission) containing at least one technical single‐word family member. The corpus consists of 20 prepared speeches: 10 each in 2020 and 2021 by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Director‐General of Health Dr. Ashley Bloomfield (50,782 tokens). The results showed that 6.02% of the single‐word families (e.g., outbreak(‐s), contact(‐s/‐less)) in the texts were technical, which may present a challenge for comprehension. Unsurprisingly, the Director‐General of Health used more technical vocabulary than the Prime Minister. The top 20 MWUs containing technical vocabulary were identified in the corpus. Most were two‐word collocations (e.g., negative test, testing centre/s, and number of tests). Implications for identifying and dealing with technical vocabulary in both government communications and language education are discussed.

The focus of this chapter is on how students in a polytechnic institution in New Zealand learn the technical language of their vocational ‘trade’ through being exposed to their instructors’ talk and through engaging in classroom interactions. This chapter draws on a 455,000-word corpus of spoken discourse which was collected at a polytechnical institute as part of a larger study of vocational language in an educational setting. Through analysis of instructor–student talk, we show how features of this talk support students in learning the technical language of their trade through exposure to instructor talk. The chapter also illustrates a range of methods that instructors use to focus on the vocabulary of workplace language and ways that students engage with learning workplace language during their studies. Examples from the corpus in the ‘trades’ of plumbing, carpentry, automotive technology and fabrication are used as illustration.

This paper reports on the creation of specialized word lists in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), which is a discipline using vocabulary across languages (i.e., Chinese and English) and involves learners with different L1 backgrounds. First, a TCM Word List of 2,778 specialized words was established from corpora of TCM textbooks and journal articles. Selection criteria included specialized meaning, keyness in a corpus of general written English compared to the TCM Corpora, and frequency. The resulting TCM list covered 36.65% of the TCM Corpora but had low coverage over corpora of general written English and medical English. The TCM Word List was then divided into three sub-lists based on frequency, and graded into three levels. Level 1 contains high-frequency lexical items in English (e.g., organ, coating); Level 2 contains items that are mid-, low-frequency, or beyond any frequency levels (e.g., pericarpium, metabolism); and Level 3 contains Chinese loan words (e.g., qi, yang). Last, there is an overlap of 309 word families between this list and an earlier TCM list by Hsu (2018), which excludes words from the 1st-3rd 1,000 word families in English. Suggestions for teachers and future research are provided.

In the field of English for Specific Purposes, corpora have been widely employed to deepen our understanding of the nature of vocabulary in spoken and written texts for specific purposes, particularly recently as access to corpora and corpus-based tools for analysis are more readily available than before. Core issues and research approaches that will be discussed in this chapter include identifying lexical items (single and multiword unit) that are worth learning because of their frequency and/or their importance in relation to a specific topic and finding out more about how large a vocabulary might be in various areas of ESP. This research helps us understand more about issues facing second and foreign language ESP students in their quest to learn and learn to use specialized vocabulary appropriately and in the right context. Corpora have also been used both directly and indirectly to support the learning and teaching of vocabulary, sometimes to quite good effect, but often not so much. This chapter attempts to draw together key issues on corpora in teaching and learning vocabulary in ESP, illustrate current research through several case studies of innovative uses of corpora in ESP, and finally discuss several directions for future research.

This study explores English for specific purposes learners’ understanding of technical words in a previously-developed technical word list in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). The principal aim was to estimate what kind of technical terms pose problems to TCM learners and might therefore merit special attention in instruction. Of particular interest was the question whether there is a divergence in the understanding of technical vocabulary in TCM between Chinese and Western background learners. To achieve these aims, a combination of word association tasks and retrospective interviews was implemented with 11 Chinese and 10 Western background TCM learners. The data showed that both Chinese and Western learners encountered certain difficulties in understanding technical vocabulary in their study. However, their sources of difficulty were different. Comparisons of typical word associations between Chinese and Western learners indicated that there was a degree of divergence in the way these two participant groups understood TCM terms.