Word Lists: Useful Pedagogical Tool, or Red Herring?

Partially in response to Nakamaru's (2010) article on lexical issues for second language writers, and partially based on my own experience as a writing center tutor working with students who sometimes struggle to find their own words, I was interested in devoting my final blog entry for this class to vocabulary building. Since I have focused heavily this semester on academic writing and the challenges second language writers may face in manipulating this highly contextualized written language to their advantage, I decided to review Hyland & Tse's (2007) examination of Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List (AWL).

Although Hyland & Tse (2007) regard the AWL as a noble undertaking, they question its underlying theoretical assumption, which is that second language students entering an academic discourse community will be well-served by having a general, "all-purpose" academic vocabulary. To this end, the authors undertook a corpus-based study of their own in order to more objectively evaluate the AWL's coverage of words that students were likely to encounter in their studies. Although they found that the AWL had a respectable level of coverage across the board, this coverage was not equal across disciplines, and furthermore, that many of the words in Coxhead's corpus were dependent on specific context for their meaning. The authors draw the conclusion that world lists targeting "generalized" academic vocabulary such as the AWL may not be particularly useful in teaching students the discipline-specific, context-dependent lexis they need to succeed in university.

In touting lists of so-called "transition words" to my students in the writing center, I am implicitly endorsing the view that certain lists of words are generalizable to a variety of academic contexts. Although reading this article has not changed my views on this particular word list, mainly because it is small and each of its members has a rhetorical purpose as well a linguistic one, I certainly appreciate Hyland & Tse's (2007) thoughtfully critical evaluation of the AWL's underlying concept. What their results suggest, and what they make explicit in their conclusion, is that academic vocabulary learning is a highly context-dependent endeavor and is best managed within individual communities of practice. 
 

These conclusions evoke a tension I have explored in my last several blog posts: the idea that writing, like talk, may be better "locally managed" (Canagarajah, 2007). Unlike the pro- position I took last week on the codification of ELF grammar as a way of empowering L2 writers seeking publication in academic journals, I am hesitant, like Hyland & Tse (2007), to prescribe the learning of lexical items from "on high," and this for a very practical reason: as advocates of our students' success, we want to make sure any time they spend hunched over a compendious tome is well spent. It is easy to imagine our students dutifully memorizing all 570 of Coxhead's word families, only to find that their efforts have not resulted in as great a payoff as they had hoped.