Which words do my students need next?
- Word lists based on frequency and range of use provide basic information about which words are most necessary and useful.
- You can analyse vocabulary use in curriculum reading material and the curriculum exemplars to get a picture of the word frequency levels that are expected for the students you teach.
- You can compare your Pasifika students’ vocabulary knowledge and use with what is expected of their cohort.
- The students can work with you on analysing which words they need to use and setting vocabulary goals for English and for their Pasifika languages.
Academic vocabulary
Students start to use and extend their academic vocabulary from the time they start school. It is important to ensure that your bilingual Pasifika students make the necessary progress with vocabulary development in English. At the same time, you can affirm their development in their Pasifika languages by trying some of the suggestions in the inquiry Affirming Pasifika languages in the mainstream .
Materials written for students at levels 1–4 of the curriculum, and materials produced by students in New Zealand curriculum exemplars at these levels, already show a substantial load of academic and other uncommon words. You can see this by analysing the vocabulary levels in the materials in the associated material Materials for vocabulary analysis . You can also try out your own materials and what your students produce. This will help you to build up a picture of their current and required vocabulary.
How to analyse the vocabulary levels
You can do this analysis by using the Web VP site. (‘VP’ stands for ‘Vocabulary Profile’). All you have to do is:
- copy some text you want to analyse
- paste it into the box on the website, replacing the text that’s already there
- click on the DO IT button
- wait briefly for your analysis results to pop up.
Your students may enjoy doing this themselves.
The words will show up in four different colours, according to how difficult or uncommon they are. The program will tell you how many word ‘types‘ and ‘tokens’1 the text contains, and how many times each occurs, based on the following four frequency levels:
- The list of the most frequent 1000 word families
- The list of the second 1000 word families
- The Academic Word List
- The words that do not appear in any of the preceding lists.
(The inquiry How many words should my students know? explains these word lists. See also Nation, 1984.2)
Footnotes
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When the program counts the words, it counts each different word (type) and each separate time a word occurs (token). In the previous sentence, ‘counts’ is one type. There are two tokens of this type because ‘counts’ occurs twice.
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These vocabulary lists are available from Victoria University of Wellington.
