Learning Academic Vocabulary

A very nice person in Holland has created a beautiful guide to help you study and learn words on the Academic Word List.

1. Look at the page which you can find at:
 http://www.intuitproject.nl/uploads/media/Lesbrief_pilotAWL_UvT.doc

Read the information then try to answer the following questions:

1. Why is trying to learn long lists of vocabulary 'by heart' difficult?

2. What are the advantages of using the Academic Word List (AWL)?

3. How many words are there on the list and where do they come from?

4. What is the difference between the AWL Highlighter and the AWL Gapmaker?

5. Try Copying and Pasting your essay draft into the Highlighter and submitting it on level 10 - how many of your words are on the list? Do you repeat the same word a lot?

Have a look at the links below for more resources and practice exercises.

Nb: You don't have to learn all the words on all the sub-lists, but you should at least be aware of the importance of these words and do your best to familiarise yourself with some of them and use them where possible. 

The Academic Word List

Academic vocabulary exercises

AWL - with definitions

General & Academic vocabulary exercises

More Academic Word list exercises

Vocabulary help 

An example corpus - BNC BYU

2. It's a good idea to create your own glossary of words related to your subject. It's likely that your subject area will have its own particular vocabulary and jargon - why not organise a list of words related to your subject? When you write a word down, try to include an example, other words in that family if there are any, and pronunciation tips as well as just a translation into your own language. 

You'll find some example glossaries below:

Law

Legal English Vocabulary Exercises 

Economics 

and here

Business

Marketing

Homework!

As promised, here's a few things I'd like you to do before next Tuesday:

1. Make sure you know the basics about Verb patterns (go through the worksheet from Oxford English Grammar Course which I gave you at the end of Thursday's class) - this is quite basic, but it's a good idea to work through it so that you are clear what we're talking about next Tuesday when we look in more detail at verb patterns.

Q: What are Verb patterns?
A: When TWO verbs come together, one after the other, we need to know how the second one behaves (Infinitive? - ing? Preposition? Direct object etc). For example:

She decided to go to the pub with her friends.  The 2 verbs are decide and go. When the verb 'decide' is followed by another verb, the second verb needs to be in the Infinitive form. Don't ask why! That's just the way it is.

2.  For a little further practice of Cause and Effect language (very important for your essay), I'd like you to write 5 sentences related to the Hans Rosling video and summary about Asia's rise that we did this week. For example:

Hans Rosling attributed the lack of development to the high levels of inequality in some Asian countries.

Send your 5 sentences to me by email by Monday evening at the latest!!

3. How to make referencing and writing bibliographies much easier for yourself...

I'd like you to do a little bit of research into an online tool called Zotero. This is a free referencing software which you can download onto your laptop (if you have one) to make your life much easier when it comes to saving online articles, writing and formatting references for your essays and automatically creating your bibliography. I very strongly recommend getting to know this service (or another similar software) as you will thank me for it one day ;-)

The links below will help you to get started.

http://www.zotero.org/
http://www.zotero.org/support/quick_start_guide

When you've completed all your homework, you'll look like this hairy frogfish (which lives in Indonesia..)

Summary Skills

 In Tuesday's class, we watched a short talk by Hans Rosling. Below you'll find an example summary of the main points from the talk:

In this short talk Hans Rosling, a statistician, describes how the gap between Western and Asian countries, in terms of income per capita and life expectancy, has been getting smaller in the recent past. He outlines the changes in these two indicators since the mid-19^th century, describing the positive and negative impacts of factors such as war, technological advances, independence, and political issues at specific times, showing that it was only after the second World War that the Asian giants, China and India, began to catch up with the West.

He argues that from the middle of the 20^th century, all the world’s economies began to converge, although some regions were developing faster than others and there were also wide variations within countries. The biggest obstacle to the development of health and wealth in these emerging economies is inequality. Rosling predicts that China and India will overtake the US and UK in their development in 2048.

You can find more exercises on summarising and paraphrasing on the excellent UEFAP site