Introduction
This paper showcases a model for incorporating the latest technology into an EFL
course for native French speakers who eventually intend to study at an American
university. This intensive, transitional summer course targets students at the late high
school to early university level in Lyon, France. These students anticipate beginning or
continuing their university studies in the United States. A few have been in French
universities for at least a year and are planning to study abroad for only one semester.
Many others have just completed high school and plan to begin a full four years of study
at an American university.
This is a very similar population to the one that I have addressed in other graduate
research and papers at Georgia State University. Particularly, this document intends to
address the setting of this course and its major objectives, the background of this group of
learners, and finally the ways in which Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL)
can facilitate learning in the EFL classroom. Such methods can aid teachers in choosing
and preparing examples and activities; for students, they can also offer new methods of
vocabulary exposure.
Setting
This private summer course is offered in a language center in the city of Lyon, in
southeastern France, to students expecting to travel to the United States. It relies on a
companion Web site: http://www.student.gsu.edu/~bhodges2/myweb5. (While Apple’s
QuickTime and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser are needed to properly view all
pages, they are not necessary to participate in all activities. Additionally, some words,
Using CALL to Teach Academic Vocabulary 3
such as centre, may be spelled in British English. This is simply because British English
is the norm used in French schools.)
Ideally, classes will be divided into fifteen to twenty students in order to facilitate
small group activities. The course is conducted Monday through Friday morning for three
hours, with one fifteen-minute break during each lesson. Thus, in ten weeks, participants
will have spent about one hundred fifty hours in class. Finally, students have access
during weekday afternoons and Saturday mornings to a computer lab with Internet
access. The center includes a small library with brochures, catalogs, and a cross-sampling
of textbooks from several large American universities.
Students are likely to be highly motivated, as they already have or know that they
will need strong English skills for their transition. However, based on interviews with
French students at Georgia State University, high-school and university courses in France
are generally more lecture-style. As a result, this population needs help with speaking and
listening as much, if not more, than reading and writing. “The norms of whole class
lecturing have changed...over recent decades. Increasingly, college lecturers have been
developing ever more participatory styles for interacting with groups of students”
(Murphy, 2006, p. 34).
In class, students will spend a large amount of time conducting group work
exercises and student-initiated and student-led presentations and other activities. They
will have to speak up and give opinions in class—a cultural difference they are sure to
encounter once in the United States. Additionally, topics for texts include cultural
adaptation, American universities and subject matter that these students intend to study
Using CALL to Teach Academic Vocabulary 4
during their exchange or study abroad. (For some examples, please visit the companion
Web site for the course.)
For better or for worse, French high schools are set up in such a way that a student
can frequently rise through the ranks without improving his or her English. In order to
“pass” a grade, students must only maintain an average of 10 out of 20 in all subjects
together—not each subject. Once students are promoted to the next grade, they begin a
more advanced English course—even if they did not succeed in their English course from
the previous year. In this way, some students fall far behind in one or more subjects while
excelling in others. Today, English is heavily weighted as a subject, however—a
reflection of how important the French consider English today.
Course Outline
A major component of the course is repeated exposure to and use of academic
vocabulary. Although CALL is a relatively new and rapidly changing field, numerous
studies have demonstrated the importance of vocabulary in language development and
fluency, as well as the advantages of computer-based approaches to teaching them (Horst,
Cobb, & Nicolae, 2005; Sun & Wang, 2003; Tozcu & Coady, 2004). To this end, this
course relies on the Academic Word List (AWL), a corpus developed by Coxhead
(2000). Many, if not a majority, of the most common words in the AWL have the same or
a slightly different spelling in French, and usually the same meaning. MacKay (1987)
noted that one reason words coincide is because of the historical influence of French in
English orthography. Following the Norman Conquest in 1066, French even became the
official language of England. According to Avery & Ehrlich (1992), one explanation for
Using CALL to Teach Academic Vocabulary 5
coincidental vocabulary is simply borrowing facilitated by the proximity of France and
England.
Given two words, second-language (L2) learners acquire faster the one that more
closely resembles the translation in the L2 (Adjemian, 1983). For example, obvious as in,
“It’s very obvious to me,” is in the AWL. But a French speaker is more likely to prefer a
Latin- or Greek-based, transparent synonym simply because it is much easier to acquire:
evident. Thus, we hear, “It’s very evident to me.” For these reasons, careful attention was
given to select those words of the AWL that are not what the French call mots
transparents (transparent words, and a good example of one).
Many other AWL words are spelled exactly the same in French, but have entirely
different meanings. For example, location in French is used when talking about renting
something such as a car or house, not to refer to a place. Selected words, then, were
almost always either false friends or had Old English backgrounds with no French
equivalent.
This ten-week course introduces many new words, but only concentrates on about
ten per week. All are derived from the AWL. For each of these weekly sets, the course
progresses with a series of at least seven activities, generally conducted in the following
order:
1. Identification of the target words in a text using a concordancer, or in a series of
sentences the teacher generates with a concordancer.
2. Attempting to determine their meaning from the context, sentence position,
prefixes and suffixes.
3. Matching the words with definitions in a list
Using CALL to Teach Academic Vocabulary 6
4. A crossword puzzle incorporating all of the words.
5. A cloze exercise where students complete the text with the missing words.
6. A lecture in which students identify the words and discuss the lecture using the
words.
7. Independent writing or an oral presentation about personal experiences or ideas
using the words.
This progression moves from identifying and isolating the target words to using them
communicatively.
Much of the time in the earlier portion of each week consists of identifying words
with a concordancer and other tools (see the Links page of the Web site), pair and group
discussions, identification of root and stem patterns, and identifying word categories from
these. For an excellent introduction to uses of concordancers and other online tools, see
Diniz & Moran (2005). In each unit, students will also listen to a lecture in class and,
finally, write an essay or organize a debate, skit, or presentation. Each of these final
activities is based on the particular week’s theme and vocabulary. Many of these
activities are drawn from Murphy (2006) and Coxhead (2006) in Chapter 13, Academic
Vocabulary in Speaking Activities.
Students do most of the online activities outside of class, whether in the language
center’s computer lab or at home. These include several vocabulary exercises, a cloze
test, and a listening quiz. Ideally, these activities should be spaced out—that is, not
completed all at one sitting. The instructor can assure this by requesting that students do
activities at different times. (When students complete many of the activities, they submit
their time-stamped results to the instructor via Web mail). Such activities, when used
Using CALL to Teach Academic Vocabulary 7
regularly, meet Coxhead’s principles of frequency, repetition, spaced retrieval and
generation (2006).
Sample Unit
The sample unit is for the final unit in the course, which takes place in the tenth
week. The theme is largely about American university teaching styles, their academic
calendar, and intercultural adaptation (See Unit 10 on the Web site). This unit progresses
in an order similar to the one just described.
The week begins with a motivational discussion about expectations and cultural
differences that student anticipate they may encounter in the United States. Using a
concordancer such as the one developed by Mark Davies at Brigham Young University
(see Links on the Web site), the teacher might provide a series of sentences with each of
the words in a different context. Alternatively, students themselves could be assigned to
search for each word using the concordancer and to determine their meanings in groups
or individually. Together, they could identify the most frequent collocations of these
words in different contexts. Early on, perhaps even as a homework assignment for the
second day, students should also begin practicing with these words using the first four
exercises for Unit 10 (see the Web site). These exercises include matching activities and
a crossword puzzle.
The second and third days, the teacher will present materials and a lecture about
the theme. For this unit, students can listen to recordings of the three parts of the lecture,
and view the PowerPoint presentation and a video made by German exchange students in
the United States, on the companion Web site. During in-class discussions, students
Using CALL to Teach Academic Vocabulary 8
should have opportunities to identify these words in the lecture, negotiate meaning, and
finally, use them in their own authentic dialog in new ways.
By the fourth day, students will have completed the vocabulary cloze test and the
listening quiz. These vary from chapter to chapter. They will receive instructions for how
to complete their final, most independent task. For this week, this task is a short essay
about either the lecture or the video (see Unit 10 on the Web site). As previously noted,
while this week’s final task is an essay, other units may involve a debate, skit, or
presentation. Finally, students should bring these to class in a digital format so that they
can check their vocabulary use with the Web Vocabulary Profiler developed by Tom
Cobb (see the Links page of the companion Web site).
Conclusion
The design for this course attempts to take advantage of many recent contributions
that technology has made to the field of language teaching, particularly with regards to
vocabulary acquisition. These contributions include those that instructors use in
preparation, as well as those students might use, whether in or outside of class. Corpus
linguistics, and the AWL in particular, permit such a narrow group of students to
concentrate on words they need most and may find challenging. Concordancers, whether
used by the teaching to prepare or directly by students, offer instant access to a plethora
of authentic examples. Students can study words and phrases as they are used in specific
registers, such as academic texts or academic speech. They can even analyze their own
writing using a variety of free, online programs (See Links on the Web site).
Traditionally, teaching EFL typically meant that the instructor had very limited access to
authentic materials for listening and reading. Today, the Internet offers more and more
Using CALL to Teach Academic Vocabulary 9
text, images, and streaming video and audio. Finally, free programs such as Hot Potatoes
allow teachers to develop vocabulary exercises easily that students can do anywhere, and
anytime. In summary, before they were incorporated, careful reflection was given as to
the practicality and usefulness of each CALL exercise found in the model unit outlined
here.
Using CALL to Teach Academic Vocabulary 10
References
Adjemian, C. (1983). The transfer of lexical properties. In S. Gass & L. Selinker (Eds.),
Language transfer in language learning (pp. 250-268). Rowley, MA: Newbury
House.
Avery, P., & Ehrlich, S. (1992). Problems of selected language groups. In Teaching
American English pronunciation (pp. 111-157). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Coxhead, A. (2000). A new academic word list. TESOL Quarterly, 34(2), 213-238.
Coxhead, A. (2006). Essentials of teaching academic vocabulary. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Diniz, L., & Moran, K. (2005). Corpus linguistics and students' writing. Essential
Teacher Magazine.
Horst, M., Cobb, T., & Nicolae, I. (2005). Expanding academic vocabulary with an
interactive on-line database. Language Learning & Technology, 9(2), 90-110.
MacKay, I. (1987). Phonetics: The science of speech production (2nd ed.). Boston: Allyn
and Bacon.
Murphy, J. (2006). Essentials of Teaching Academic Oral Communication. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Sun, Y.-C., & Wang, L.-Y. (2003). Concordancers in the EFL classroom: cognitive
approaches and collocation difficulty. Computer Assisted Language Learning,
16(1), 83-94.
Tozcu, A., & Coady, J. (2004). Successful learning of frequent vocabulary throug CALL
also benefits reading comprehension and speed. Computer Assisted Language
Learning, 17(5), 475-495.
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