nf1292: i thought what i'd do today having introduced to you last week the idea of er measuring vocabulary do you remember do you remember the er do you remember the E er E-V-S-T er test yes with a yes-no the yes-no test from last week and you had a handout er with the words where you had to say whether you r- , recognized them or not er i thought i would show this week some ways in which that had been put into use as a means of research by students here right and i've got three examples of er research students here in CELTE who have used er the yes-no test format as part of their research and then i thought if there's time i'd show you er i'd move on to show you some research which went beyond that and looked at er vocabulary knowledge more extensively because of course there's more to knowing a word than just being able to recognize it on the page nf1292: the handout er that you've got in front of you is from a Chinese student you can see namex it say-, says from namex and namex nineteen-ninety-nine er this is a PhD student that we had with us for quite some time she came from mainland China then she er she came here and now she she married an American she's now living in Chicago so [laughter] er and she was interested in Chinese students er here at namex er b-, she had to in the end she had to use Hong Kong Chinese students because they were more of them and they were there are a lot of Hong Kong Chinese students in the Engineering department i don't know if you've noticed them but there's lots of them and they do have language problems and i-, er from her er conversations with these students she got the impression that the vocabulary that they had greatest difficulty with was the technical vocabulary now that's really flying in the face of received opinion because it's generally thought that overseas students or non-native speakers have problems with what's called subtechnical vocabulary that is the language of academic discourse words like prioritize and analysis and distribute those kind of words that are used right across the range of academic subjects it's believed that those are the vocabulary items that are difficult for non-native speakers and that the truly technical terms don't pose a problem that's the belief if you read about er the vocabulary needs of university students that is what you will read so the title of our paper is Are We Teaching The Right Words [laugh] and i mean i don't know [laughter] it er i-, i-, it could be that her [sneeze] research [laughter] sf1293: sorry nf1292: was just a blip in the otherwise er but not a great deal of research has been done into this she wanted to find out whether it was the subtechnical vocabulary or the technical vocabulary that was causing difficulties for the Hong Kong engineering students at namex so she er her first the first thing that she did was to make a corpus of engineering texts er some of you i hope all of you now have heard about er corpus design a little bit we'll be doing we'll be looking at it in the CALL option this afternoon and er those of you who do Use of English will have had a look at the British National Corpus a little bit and last week i mentioned it as well w-, er er with regard to frequency lists because frequency lists are derived from corpora so everybody feels that they know a bit about corpora language corpora yeah well if you want to ask a question like do students know er what kind of words do students know in their engineering programme and what kind of words don't students know in their engineering programme it's no use taking a general frequency list is it because it won't contain the words that they er read on their engineering course so she had to create her own corpus and er er c-, how how would she do this any suggestions [laugh] sf1294: looked at technical books and technical material nf1292: yes sf1294: mm nf1292: yeah she she actually took the any-, has anyone got any other suggestions as how it might be done that's in fact what she did but has anyone got any sf1295: did she use any technical dictionaries nf1292: er er she didn't because it would have been difficult to know whether those were the actual words used sf1295: right nf1292: er on those particular courses in fact the M-A in er the M-S-C in Engineering at namex is a very complex course it's got lots and lots of different modules and every student seems to take a different pathway you know you can have so many choices so it's a it's like y-, your M-A but more complicated because every student might take a different you know a different sets of options and so er in fact there's a lot there's a wery wide coverage of subjects ranging from business right through to very highly sort of technical work on s-, sort of physics er no one's got any more s-, what about what sf1296: recording sm1297: mm nf1292: yeah that would have been ideal if if we'd [laugh] if er if we'd been doing the C-D-ROM project then we would have be-, we would have had access to recordings of lectures can you give the handout to the people who've just come in er we would have been able to use recordings of lectures and that would have been brilliant but at the time i mean er y-, i must say that corpora of this kind are very new and i don't know if anyone has got anyone in the world has got a good corpus of postgraduate engineering course English so er it's not as sh-, it wasn't as though she was competing with other products elsewhere er she used textbooks she scanned in engineering textbooks she used the recommended books from from the reading list that the students were given and so she got her corpus in fact it ended up in here it says a hundred-and-ninety-seven- thousand i think it ended up as larger than that but at the time when this experiment was done and er she divided them up into technical words and subtechnical words and common words can anyone any-, any idea how she did that she wanted to know whether which were the words that were causing difficulty to these students so first of all she had to categorize the words anyone got any suggestions how you might go about doing that sf1298: got plastic sm1299: sf1298: plastic industry if you divide it into industries or departments of the engineering or nf1292: they were all the words er all the sources were er divided up according to modules sf1298: u-huh nf1292: yeah but so for example there is a module called Polymer Materials Processes and Product sf1298: mm-hmm nf1292: i don't know if they actually use that full term it would be very you t- , it's a bit of a tongue twister but er er there are about twenty modules of that type er so she looked when she got m-, made her corpus she marked up the sources so that she knew whether a text belonged to this module or another module but that wasn't her question she didn't want to know er is the vocabulary of polyem-, polymer materials [laughter] easier than the vocabulary of er plastics and erosion or something she wanted to know whether technical vocabulary was more difficult than subtechnical sf1298: but this is technical isn't it here nf1292: this is technical yes sf1298: yeah nf1292: but how did she identify the how did she distinguish between the technical the so-called subtechnical and the common everyday words because obviously er a lot of the text in any subject is sm1300: you can test the frequency of words sf1301: mm sm1300: used in a lecture nf1292: well she didn't actually use lectures she could ha-, she wou-, she would have done if she'd had access to them but sh-, she didn't so she used textbooks but ho-, how would you how would the frequency what would the frequency tell you sm1300: you have to create a database you know er to count in all the words most frequently used er in one text or several texts there nf1292: but that would er i-, sh-, in fact she did that she looked at frequency but how does that categorize words into technical subtechnical and common because in fact the most frequent words in a in a let's say you looked up in a t-, a textbook a chapter about corrosion probably corrosion is the most frequent word but of course we know that corrosion is not a frequent word in the language in general sm1300: you can check that out with research papers you know of course in the f- , from the field nf1292: oh that would be great if you could but if you could do that you wouldn't actually need to do the research yourself would you sm1300: mm nf1292: this is this is the question that faces us all when we're doing research that at at this level at postgraduate level unfortunately there doesn't exist any research which says which words are er technical and which are subtechnical or if there does then namex's research is challenging it sf1302: did she have to er ask somebody in the department for some kind of word list and then tag them up herself nf1292: yes sf1302: when she devised the the corpus nf1292: that's an interesting notion do you think departments have word lists sf1303: mm-mm nf1292: [laughter] ss: no sf1304: nf1292: it's perhaps some do er er er we don't if if someone came to us at CELTE and said what's your word list [laughter] for er technical terms in applied linguistics we'd the all that we could say was well there are dictionaries of applied linguistics sf1305: yeah nf1292: we couldn't actually say what we used or what we expect what words we c- , we could recognize them and in that it in in fact she did this after having identified her technical terms she went back to the lecturers and asked them to mark up the ones that they thought were most important but they couldn't she couldn't have spontaneously asked them to compile a list because they wouldn't have been able to think i mean she had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of technical terms y-, her her the the lecturers wouldn't have been able to m-, m-, dream those up they wouldn't they wouldn't have remembered sf1306: have we got excuse me nf1292: yeah sf1306: have we got a list of the subtechnical words from this module because just with the technical words you know doesn't help me analyse how she did it i mean i know what a polymer is and i know what nf1292: yeah sf1306: is nf1292: i'll i'll talk you through it shall i sf1306: yeah nf1292: er er n-, nobody's g-, nobody seems to have any idea how it's done so i'll tell you [laughter] er sf1307: nf1292: you you see the problem don't you sf1307: yeah nf1292: she w-, er er sh-, the q-, the research question was er there's tech-, er we have a notion we all have a notion i think that some words are technical yeah everyone has a feeling for that don't they i mean if we look at this if we look at thermoplastics i think we'd all agree that's not an everyday word and it's not a word that's used in academic subjects generally yep er this is the first time this word has ever been used in CELTE we we don't use the word thermoplastics does not pop up in lectures in er applied linguistics right so we sort of feel that that's technical er we also have a feeling for words which are academic but are not technical what we'd call subtechnical is that true everyone has a feeling for that if you look over the page table two you'll see a er er a very small sample of the words that we might think of as being subtechnical sf1308: is this for the same module nf1292: er i'll explain in a moment sf1308: oh okay [laugh] nf1292: er so it's ensure priority precise fundamental those are words which you'd expect you'd want people studying at university level to know yes they're useful words for writing assignments they pop up in er university level textbooks they they come up in university level lectures that's our subtechnical vocabulary that is usually the vocabulary that is that i-, er E-A- P teachers try to teach yeah because it's the kind of vocabulary that people don't learn at school yeah on the whole or maybe very at the top level of s-, of secondary school but it's the kind of vocabulary they need for university level study so that's our subtechnical vocabulary we we feel this intuitively but we want we don't want to just take our corpus and go along and say oh that's technical that's subtechnical that's technical that that would be too intuitive we can't do that we have to have some means of defining what is a technical term and what is a subtechnical term and what is an everyday word yeah so er it's namex isn't it sm1300: yeah nf1292: yeah so namex's idea of going to another research paper that's already done it is a great idea but it's not possible because nobody else has done it people will be coming to this research paper in the future but w-, w-, when you d-, when you're doing research you often have to just strike out at-, for something you can take models of er previous approaches but you can't actually take the data because the data isn't there so w-, what er what namex did in actual fact was she took a er a five-thousand word frequency list this Thorndike and Lorge yeah it's a very standard word frequency list and she said okay we're going to n-, knock out any word in the corpus that is in Thorndike and le-, Lorge's frequency list of the most frequent five-thousand words in the language yeah why did she do that why did she knock those out why did she remove sf1309: er was she doing a process of elimination nf1292: yeah but why did she do it sf1309: 'cause they're not technical words nf1292: yeah they're not technical they're not subtechnical er and anyway the students probably knew all those you know you'd expect them to have five-thou a five-thousand word vocabulary at least so you can just knock those out so what do you do with the remainder the remainder presumably are more difficult words some of them will be subtechnical some of them will be technical how do you distinguish between those two except intui-, apart from intuitively sf1310: i-, is one actually a product er that one's actually a product or er a specific process nf1292: well if you look at these words i mean actually a l-, these ones here are are nouns but they er er sf1311: what are you talking about the subtechnical or the technical nf1292: er subtechnical or technical i mean they er they don't seem sf1311: nf1292: to belong to a particular they could be er of any lexical word class sf1311: so how do we divide the technical nf1292: yeah sf1311: words from the subtechnical words nf1292: from the subtechn-, i mean it's a truism in i mean all the time in vocabulary teaching we read about technical terms we read about subtechnical terms we read about core vocabulary but how do you know whether it's technical or subtechnical sm1312: intuitively [laughter] nf1292: it's always been done intuitively in the past but it's not very satisfactory is it sf1313: would she somehow is there any way she would link it to the British National Corpus and er and use nf1292: you sf1313: use a way of i mean i don't know if the British National Corpus have a a way of describing technical and non-technical terms nf1292: no no sf1313: no nf1292: no sf1313: so she's not nf1292: no sf1313: sort of nf1292: it's there's no-, there's nothing like that tagged in and if it was how would they have done it sf1313: nf1292: it's the same question as namex i mean sf1313: yeah nf1292: you're you're saying well we'll go back and look at what somebody else has said but in fact i-, er er with a lot of research you can't do that you have to make your own decisions it's quite frightening really isn't it when you do research and then you suddenly look round and you're the one who's making the decisions you can't just say you ju-, can't just report on what somebody else has said sf1314: maybe she compared it to another course and compared the words that were similar the technical nf1292: that yes sf1314: one would have been the one of the nf1292: the i think we're getting somewhere here aren't we i th-, what you're what you seem to be saying is that technical words would only occur on an engineering course sm1315: nf1292: and subtechnical vocabulary would also occo-, occur on a course in applied linguistics sm1315: look at the interdisciplinary side nf1292: yes sm1315: mm nf1292: yeah s-, what what we're actually talking about is the two er parameters of frequency and range aren't we er subtechnical fa-, er vocabulary has a wide range technical vocabulary has a narrow range as far as frequency is concerned both sets of vocabulary are maybe equ-, roughly equally frequent yeah do you see what i mean sf1316: mm-hmm nf1292: it er to go back to this idea of a frequency count if you did if you took a very large corpus like the British National Corpus er you the technical words and the subtechnical words would be equally frequent that is not very frequent at all in actual fact but if you looked at their distribution patterns they would be completely different subte-, if you took a range of texts and you too-, thought of a graph the subtechnical vocabulary would be sort of f-, f-, fairly low frequency right across a range of texts academic texts have to be academic texts whereas the technical vocabulary would peak in one f-, field and would be virtually non-existent in any of the oth-, so on the first page things like thermoplastics cur-, er occurs well b-, let's take polymer because that's a real example it has it occurs a hundred-and- six times but with a range of one so only in one only in one text only one subject right er in fact what namex did was take i think there were twenty-odd modules and as i say they ranged from physics to business and she said they it occurs w-, in just one module so only one module of the course ever mentions polymer but they but in the sample of texts she took it occurred a hundred-and- six times right so but if you turn over the page a word like ensure which is subtechnical occurs forty-six times but across fifteen modules okay yeah so that answers namex's question she said are they all a-, are the subtechnical vocabulary from one module sf1317: yes nf1292: and no it's not it's from fifteen you know it's from fifteen sixteen eighteen seventeen modules because in fact it would only probably i-, it only occurs two or three times in each of those modules sf1318: how many modules were taken to nf1292: well you know i can't remember exactly but it must be it must be over sf1319: over eighteen sm1320: eighteen nf1292: it must be over eighteen 'cause that's the largest number we have here i've g-, i think it's about twenty- one twenty-two different modules i c-, i can check for you sf1319: nf1292: if you like mm sf1321: er for like tests kind of thing nf1292: er you in you mean their productive use sf1321: no nf1292: yeah no she that's an interesting research question and i-, er somebody here might decide that they wanted to do just that i mean it would be er ideally it if you had lots of time it would be very interesting to compare receptive and productive knowledge but she only looked at receptive knowledge she actually looked at er how w-, what words students could recognize in actual fact as an indicator of how er how successful they would be in reading their set texts so i-, the productive language is ma-, is rather difficult actually isn't it because you can avoid using words and it then it's impossible to measure whether you know them or not we'll get on to that in just a moment because it is a problem if you want to find out whether somebody knows a word by examining their productive output you hit problems because just because the word isn't in their assignment doesn't mean that they couldn't write it if they wanted to so it it is problematic isn't it er you know if we looked i-, in fact those of you who are in the CALL option if you'd like to come along this afternoon with er a disk full of your own writing we can try it out on a concordancer and we you can have a frequency list of all the words you use in your assignments if anyone would like to do that if who's in the CALL option or anyone really if they want to come along er sometime and try it out er you can actually look at all the words you've produced in your assignments so far this year you if you have a corpus of all your assignments but that's not a sum total of all the words you well you could use sf1322: i i i think that's probably more er obvious with subtechnical than the technical 'cause they can't get away with writing about plastics if they're going to use these words nf1292: yes sf1322: they can with the subtechnical sf1322: yes yes that's an interesting point sf1322: yeah nf1292: that's an interesting question sf1322: but they can't replace any of these with anything else but they could some subtechnical words nf1292: yes yes that's true er that's true yes it's very i-, you start getting into subjective judgements about sf1322: yes nf1292: the subtechnical words 'cause you're you're start asking yourself well would i-, would ensure have been a more appropriate word here and it's difficult to sf1322: mm nf1292: okay so having so she identified o-, on the basis of frequency and range her technical and her subtechnical and having done that she borrowed the ide-, idea from the E-V-S-T remember E-, E-V-S-T the yes-no vocabulary test she just borrowed that idea she couldn't use that test because that test is for very frequent knowledge of very frequent words the first ten-thousand words in English so obviously words like polymer weren't tested there so she had to make her own tests and she tested everybody for the technical vocabulary in the modules they had taken it wouldn't have been fair to test them on the technical vocabulary of the modules they hadn't taken and she tested ev-, and everyone got the same test for subtechnical vocabulary because the subtechnical vocabulary occurred across all the modules er and you can see table seven-point- one the the numbers are not in order 'cause i just took this from her thesis in actual fact you can see down here that this is er er er a yes-no test for technical vocabulary can anyone [laugh] recognize which the made-up words are i'm not sure if i can actually can you see she's made some of those words are made up can anyone sf1323: is er circumhinge nf1292: i think circumhinge is made up yes sm1324: nf1292: [laugh] but you cannot be sure can you ss: nf1292: because there's a very funny sf1325: i i i would say that if somebody said to me what's a circumhinge i could imagine on a car or a piece of machinery whatever nf1292: yes yes yeah it's difficult to make up words isn't it it is difficult er and that's that could be a criticism of this type of test because when you see a a made-up word you're being asked whether you recognize it and you could say well you know i can imagine what it might be so yes sf1325: mm nf1292: i recognize it she used the same system of scoring as the E-V-S-T test did in other words if someone i think a i think circumhinge is made up if someone said that they recognized that word then they would lose marks on their overall score because it's made up does that make sense to everybody yeah sf1325: yes nf1292: er and you can see at the bottom what her scores came to what what do we conclude anyone looking at that bottom comparison of subtechnical and technical scores c-, can can anyone volunteer what conclusion she reached on that sf1326: that what well you always thought is it's completely opposite to what her results show in that students don't know as many technical terms as they do subtechnical terms and we spend more time teaching subtechnical terms when we really shouldn't be nf1292: yeah sf1326: if the results nf1292: yes yes not a popular er [laughter] sf1326: no but nf1292: not a popular finding i don't know whether anyone will follow this up er i-, of course E-A-P teachers don't like it because we don't know how to teach words like er prop-, polypropylene [laughter] er and i-, i-, it also engineering teachers don't lecturers don't like it because they've spent i-, i mean the this test took place towards the end of their e-, M-S-C programme in fact at the end of the taught course so it's a bit worrying for the engineering lecturers when when we passed back the scores to them they were a bit taken aback because they said oh well you can't actually pass this module without recognizing the word polypropylene and yet there were students who didn't recognize it and had passed sf1327: i i think it's very interesting for teachers who are going into the companies to teach nf1292: mm sf1327: the people who are doing it at the time nf1292: mm sf1327: 'cause we do tend to concentrate on the subtechnical because they say oh the technical terms are international we know them but obviously that doesn't follow so i i think nf1292: well it it depends i mean it it could be true for your students in your in that firm sf1327: yes nf1292: er y-, it's it would be interesting to find out i mean if you could do that kind of research that would be very i mean it'd be interesting for a a dissertation sf1327: yeah nf1292: you know if course you'd have to get your corpus that's the thing sf1327: right nf1292: er but nowaday-, it's getting easier and easier to make corpora for w-, because there's it's easier to scan in and er we have more access to digital recordings and so on er the next one i wanted to show you 'cause m-, sf1328: sorry i was just going to ask er were there any replies to these results because if nf1292: er sf1328: i mean if they are nf1292: we er sf1328: correct then then it's you know it's quite fundamentally important nf1292: well we didn't want to press it too hard on the Engineering department in case they er they got angry but we d-, [laughter] we did send the results out to er the Engineering department and g-, we recorded some responses from engineering lecturers and they said students ought to know [laughter] these words they were listening in class [laugh] they didn't read the they obviously didn't read the set text [laugh] sf1328: but i mean other responses from other academics in the field i mean has anybody sort of s-, said well you know nf1292: well in actual fact this o-, this paper was given at a conference a few years back and er th-, but but because of the slow pace of things in publishing and just general apathy sf1328: published nf1292: er the the c-, the conference collection the p-, conference proceedings are no-, are are haven't actually been published yet they're about to they're about to come out but i don't know what response it will receive er er you know things take a long time to trickle through and maybe it will never trickle through and maybe it will just be drop a drop in the ocean never never be heard of again these you know it's so there you are that's that's the fate of research er don't know if you if you're here for research methodology you think you've discovered something wonderful you get it published somewhere and no one ever reads it and no one ever hears it [laughter] or the opposite could happen you could be made you could become famous on the strength of it [laugh] we just don't know what's w-, w-, what response it does take a long time my er w-, when i did my PhD the s-, my supervisor said allow a ten year cir-, circle before your before what you have actually er this is in the field of applied linguistics from the time when you conduct the experiment to the time when people actually come up to you and say oh you know i've cited your work in my paper allow a ten year turnaround time because you have to think of it then you write it up then you get it published that's about three or four years and then people have to find it read it think about it think about their own experimental designs and then they publish and people are alerted to yours and it it it really is quite a slow process shouldn't be should it but that but research is so sometimes when they announce on er on the radio or on television that there's been a new medical breakthrough er don't believe that it happened that day [laughter] it it probably someone started thinking about it ten years previously and they're just it's been through a very slow process of being presented at conferences discussed published in its in a a small form in a journal then going back and to revision somebody else has picked it up it only appears on the news that day because they're short of news not because that's the day when [laughter] everyone discovered the truth er [laughter] er er here's another qu-, quick one this is this i thought you'd be interested in this because it's er it's from a student who actually did his M-A last he did his dissertation last summer who did the M-A last year Alistair Van Moere and er he was interested in completely different no-, not E-S-P at all he was interested in children er and how children learn vocabulary from reading and his er thesis was that if you could give children books with glosses in the margin to explain difficult words they would learn the vocabulary in these books much more easily than if you er i-, they would learn vocabulary much more easily than if you either gave them er a s-, a simplified reader we discussed a little bit simplified readers last week didn't we or if you gave them the original work without a gloss right so we've got normally we've got two choices when we're giving these these children were aged about sixteen seventeen and they were at an international school in Britain preparing for exams with i-, with a view to going on to British universities and they were being set the book Animal Farm to read and er there were two choices you either gave them the simplified reader or you gave them the original and Alistair said well if we could if if publishers would start producing versions of these books with a gloss he thought that would be much more beneficial for this type of student so he wanted to find out whether people with a who read the version with a gloss learned more vocabulary than people who read the original but first of all he had to find out which words they did or didn't know in Animal Farm so he took a chapter of Animal Farm took all the words this is just the first page of his test took all the er took all the words that he thought were difficult i think he probably m-, made reference to a frequency list for this can't remember and er listed them i-, you see this this i think he probably in order of occurrence in the text and he they the students had to say whether they recognized them yes or no so you see this is just the first stage in the experimental design once he had found out which words nobody knew then he ha-, he obviously couldn't gloss all the words in the t-, all the difficult words in the text there were too many there would have been hundreds of glosses there would have been more gloss than text so he just t-, picked out those words which none of the students that he was looking at knew and he glossed those and this is what his paper looked like he didn't he didn't use er made-up words because it wasn't the students understood it wasn't a test they weren't being judged in any way didn't think it was ne-, i don't think he used any made-up words this is the text er er this is the first page of the ch-, of er chapter one of Animal Farm these are the glosses he put in the margin he gave half the subjects er this version with the glosses and he gave the other half er the same text without any glosses yeah and they read it and then afterwards he gave them a series of er tests to see er to see w-, whe-, w-, how many of those words they'd learned er and some some of the tests were of this type where they had to place er the w-, the glossed words back into the gapped text er but we argued we said well it's not really just about learning those words is it it's also about general comprehension so he tested them for general comprehension as well er er he asked them things like er the pig making a speech is Old Major how does he feel about man you know so those were sort of general comprehension questions on the basis of the first chapter right and what do you think the results were sf1329: well the the students who had the gloss had a higher rate of higher understanding than the students who hadn't nf1292: yes sf1329: the gloss nf1292: yes yeah they l-, they remembered more words they and they could answer the comprehension better so it was all part of his argument it's a nice piece of research isn't it because i don't think there's anything any other existing piece of research that's that shows this although there has been an a tremendous amount of research into er reading and vocabulary i don't think there's been anything quite like that before sf1330: they remembered and understood nf1292: yes yes they scored better all round they scored better on comprehension and they scored better on being b-, able to place those words in the text and and they actually at one they are also asked here to write it er the meanings so this c-, idea of learning from context w-, we all know that you can pick up words from context but it's as we said at the beginning of the last lecture do you remember how many words a native speaker child learns per day for all of their childhood we have to try and speed up that process don't we there just isn't time to let people learn from context there wouldn't you know 'cause they've got so many words to make up if they're going to compete with native speakers er okay i'll just give ha-, i'll give you one more handout or two more handouts yeah so far we've just been thinking about in fact i'll take can i have one er so far i've just been talking about testing people on word recognition well just just started talking about but many of you would be unhappy with that in fact er who was it who was saying is it productive was it y-, was it namex or yeah yes i mean that that's a whole new question isn't it this there's er be-, er it's one thing in being able to recognize a word it's quite another to really be able to say you know that word in fact er it's a cline like everything is in applied linguistics isn't it it's there's not just a yes or a no answer to whether you know a word er all of us in our first languages too we know words words to varying extents s-, on the first on one side you've got knowing a word haven't you sf1331: mm nf1292: yeah and that's just if we'd had time i would have asked you what you thought knowing a word meant but there isn't time so just have a quick look at that er you may be able to think of more aspects to knowing a word than are listed here so there are many many there are many many er aspects to knowing a word and there are many words in English which i can recognize but i can't answer all those questions about and i'm sure that's true for everyone here for their first language as well as any other languages they may know in fact i heard on the radio they were interviewing someone and they said y-, he said oh i w-, i we-, i studied languages and the interviewer said well did you learn them [laugh] i thought what a stupid question because [laughter] i mean the you don't just sort of say oh i've learned it now that's the end [laughter] because everything is ongoing isn't it you're you're learning more and more all the time in ev-, in every language er so over the page you've got a suggestion for an interview format if you were trying to find out how much word knowledge an interviewee had yeah and you can see it's a much more complex business than simply saying do you recognize this word yes no and if as namex was suggesting you wanted to find out about the productive knowledge of for example namex namex's subjects in the Engineering department you'd have to y-, ideally you'd get them all in sh-, she she er she asked hundreds of students i mean it would ta-, be very long drawn out process wouldn't it it er hundreds of words for hundreds of students you'd you know you'd be take years and years and years but that i mean that would be the ideal and so just before we stop does er anyone got any questions on this do you do you understand it in principle someone o-, here might be interested in doing er a piece of research of this nature with a group of subjects for their dissertation no i mean you'd have on a small scale that certainly would be an interesting experiment wouldn't it to find out in depth voco-, vocabulary knowledge for a small number of subjects following this sort of model er i'll just hand i'll give you one more handout because er this is an experiment f-, someone called er corso-, i can't remember his first name David David Corson er who was he wasn't working with er he wasn't working with non-native speakers David Corson writes about native speakers of English and he has a kind of bee in his bonnet about class er i-, and he argues that children whose families don't belong to the class where Greek and Latin was taught in the past are disadvantaged throughout their educational lives and that is why he says in English speaking countries lower class working class children don't succeed academically on the whole this this is his thesis he says the real reason is because they don't have subtechnical vocabulary the kind of vocabulary we saw on namex's list words like elude and what were they elude and sf1332: nf1292: can you remember ss: ensure nf1292: ensure it wasn't elude was it ensure but those kind of words he said if you come from a kind of home where for generations your parents and your grandparents and so on ha-, have had access to gr-, Greco-Latin words classical languages then you learn these words in childhood but if you come from a background where your parents and your grandparents were not educated in this tradition you don't lea-, learn these words at home and therefore you can't succeed very at at in your exams at upper secondary and a-, a-, at university and so that's that's his argument now it's a very contentious one but he has this kind of he ha-, you you see on the right-hand side column he's got er i-, i-, they're called G-L words Greco-Latin words right words from so you Greeks will be fine you [laughter] you'll you'll you haven't got any problems at all in fact on the whole non-native speakers don't have problems with this because they learn Greco-Latin words just as quickly as Anglo-Saxon words it's native speakers who speak without these words in the home that have the problems sf1333: but doesn't doesn't that contradict then exactly what he's he's saying nf1292: n-, er well he's not talking about non-native speakers he's talking about native speakers sf1333: right nf1292: he's saying if you come from a working class family where nobody uses words like er what were the words [laughter] ss: ensure nf1292: ensure ss: fundamental nf1292: fundamental y-, you know er then your family won't use those words because n-, they didn't go to grammar school they didn't study Latin and Greek and so on and neither did your grandparents and that means that you you you you come into secondary and tertiary education without those words and you can't write your assignments well and you can't express er abstract thought very successfully because these are the words that carry the argument is that these are the words that carry abstract thought hypotheses you know mental processes right very difficult words to teach you know how do you teach a word like ensure it's much more difficult than words like well polymer polymer's an easier word to teach than ensure isn't it i think if i knew what it was er [laughter] er is you can see here w-, here's an argument er er on the r-, right-hand column he's saying that in philosophy of education forty per cent of words how he reaches these figures i'm not sure are oh it's a hundred a random hashes sm1334: yeah nf1292: of a hundred consecutive words that's right forty per cent of the words were Greco-Latin so if you're a working class kid who decides they want to do philosophy of education according to David Corson you don't stand a chance er right but children's fiction has none ages five to six okay and what he did was he w-, he tried to find out the productive knowledge of the children by going out and doing a bit of this oral interviewing and the words er in table one i-, he wanted to find out whether they could produce sentences with divide in them for example and he gave them two words one was the word he was testing and the other was the kind of er the carrier word so he said make a sentence using divide and fifty and on the basis of what they said he was able to judge whether they had productive knowledge of that gre-, Greco-Latin word very time- consuming rather subjective when you when you er er look at research method-, methods for quantitative st-, er qualitative sorry studies you will hear about the problems with ensuring the validity of qualitative data you you know you'd have to have a second marker or possibly a third marker and you'd have to compare to see whether you agree this a complex process it's sf1335: yes nf1292: but that way you're sort of building up a picture of productive knowledge it's much more difficult than for pres-, receptive i think okay i'll have to stop there then