To what extent do L2 students in UK Higher Education acquire academic and subject-specific vocabulary incidentally?

• Across the UK hundreds of thousands of international students pursue a higher degree through the medium of L2 English, attending the same lectures and reading the same texts as their L1 counterparts.  Although most of these international students will have initially passed through some form of English language proficiency gate-keeping exercise (such as minimum required IELTS scores), little allowance may be made thereafter for possible gaps in necessary vocabulary knowledge. Thus, L2 students may be implicitly assumed either to have sufficient working knowledge of the required vocabulary, or to be able to “pick up” this vocabulary knowledge incidentally during the course of their studies.This paper explores whether the Academic Word List (AWL) and subject-specific vocabulary knowledge of L2 undergraduates taking a degree in Biology at a UK university is, in fact, comparable to that of their L1 counterparts.  Results from a vocabulary test administered in the third week of Semester 1 of the first year of studies indicated a relatively substantial gap between the levels of vocabulary knowledge of L1 and L2 students. This gap was particularly apparent in knowledge of lower-frequency AWL vocabulary. A post-test was administered 28 weeks later, towards the end of the students’ first year at university. This paper will report on the results of the post-test and discuss to what extent this previously perceived linguistic “gap” between L1 and L2 students may have increased or decreased. The paper will also outline a follow-up investigation into the ways in which L2 students deal with unknown vocabulary encountered during the course of their undergraduate degree studies.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Language Studies and Linguistics (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

English as a second language; vocabulary acquisition; second-language vocabulary acquisition; English for academic purposes; English for specific purposes

Engelska med språkvetenskaplig inriktning

English

Lingvistik

Linguistics

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)