assignment on CALL paper

v  College :ILT. Jamnagar

v  Student’s name:-Mukesh khimjibhai davadra.

v  Submitted to :-Dr.N.V.Bose

v  Assignment on paper no.4^th .visited ESL blog and got below information.

v  Step1:-www.google.com

v  Step 2:-ESL blog

v  Step 3:-site no.32

v  Step 4:-website name:-teaching the academic word list,justspeak an ESL blog

The original intent of this post was aimed at discussing the advantages and disadvantages of learning the academic word list.

   The AWL academic word list created by Coxhead was designed to pool together a list a word families that non-native learners of English would likely encounter in academic texts:-

  But to what extent is the AWL actually useful to students, is it useful to all students, or a specific set of students? Coxhead makes a few key assumptions in creating the AWL. By not including words from the General service list (GSL), she presumes that students who might use the  AWL are already familiar with GSL.

But as Martinez et al points out there are such situations where non-native need it they learn English as they need it, they learn English in order to read and do basic research in English, these students may not know the words on the GSL.

If students, as those to which Martinez et al refers, are not familiar with the GSL, then teaching them the AWL may not be as useful as one might hope.

Instead these students, with their limited exposure to English may need extra vocabulary to supplement the AWL, so that they are introduced to the vocabulary that will aid then in doing research in English.

Durrant similarly argued that even from the GSL, they may not be familiar with the usage of these words within the context of academic texts.

In addition, Coxhead expects that her AWL when combined with the GSL will cover approximately 86% of academics that with the AWL itself covering 10%. Martinez et al regarding GSL plus the AWL only accounted for approximately 77%.

Advantages for teaching AWL

It may not be a catch all vocabulary list for students who are looking to learn word families to assist them in reading academic texts.

Much like VongPumivitch et al suggests, it may be better to expose students not just to the AWL, but also word list specific to the academic area they wish to pursue.

Disadvantages

Durrant argues that one shortcoming of Coxhead’s AWL is a lack of collocations and majority of the collocations across five different subjects areas were grammatical collocations. He maintains that these grammatical collocations are important to learners as they can indicate certain patterns with academic writing. Again, such information would be valuable to teachers of learners of foreign languages.

Conclusion

Although Coxhead’s academic word list was created to assist English language learners in their ability to read texts, this list is not without its detractors. It was been criticized for its exclusion of words from the GSL (Martinez et al) it coverage of words in academic texts(hancioglu et al).

This does not necessarily mean that AWL should not be taught in classroom.

In order to be successful in teaching, one must not only stay informed, but also be able to weigh the pros and cons of a specific tool on activity against the ultimate goals and objectives of a course in order to make a decision as to order to make a decision as to whether the tool or activity should be utilized in the language classroom.