“No, There Isn’t an ‘Academic Vocabulary,’ But...” A Reader Responds to K. Hyland and P. Tse’s “Is There an ‘Academic Vocabulary?”

“No, There Isn’t an ‘Academic Vocabulary,’ But ” A Reader Responds to K Hyland and P Tse’s “Is There an ‘Academic Vocabulary’?” JOHN ELDRIDGE Eastern Mediterranean University Famagusta, Northern Cyprus Ⅲ It was certainly pleasing to see Ken Hyland and Polly Tse reopen the debate about academic lexis and the practical teaching applications of Averil Coxhead’s Academic Word List (AWL) in the June 2007 issue of TESOL Quarterly It seems unlikely also that the discussion will abate THE FORUM 109 soon, not least because it strikes at the heart of what it means to teach English for general academic purposes and English for specific academic purposes One of Hyland and Tse’s (2007) main recommendations is that practitioners should consider using lists based on field- or subject-specific corpora, rather than the AWL They give a number of reasons for this recommendation They suggest, first, that the implication that there exists a single academic literacy is highly dubious Second, they point out that Coxhead took an “opportunistic” (p 239) approach to corpora collection, resulting in output that makes the AWL less applicable in some academic disciplines Third, they draw attention to the fact that the AWL tells us little about collocational and semantic variation, either within or between fields They conclude therefore that “the best return for learning effort is the student’s specific target corpus” (p 251) Hyland and Tse base their critique on their own corpus, derived from three subcorpora comprising the sciences, engineering, and social sciences Subdivisions into fields like electrical engineering reflect the specific target corpus types referred to earlier and comprise a range of text types by both experts and students, providing a useful model of how we might go about constructing our own subject-specific corpora Hyland and Tse (2007) however identify a problem concerning students who have to cross interdisciplinary boundaries (p 250) Their conclusion, though, along with Bhatia (2002)—that such students would in effect then need to acquire a range of different literacies—raises issues that are pedagogically complex, rife with practical and economic implications, and even ideological in aspect Much discussion seems to assume that the role of instructors teaching English for academic purposes (EAP) should be to support learners within discipline-bounded and primarily text-orientated environments Yet, in practice, the academic environment and community is interdisciplinary and diffuse by nature Transportation, accommodation, rules and regulations, exam and assignment instructions, and so forth are all humdrum aspects of academic life for many students Applications for further courses of academic study, possibly involving general academic language exams such as the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) and the Test of English as a Foreign Language, and for future jobs, may also need to be considered The skill sets, not to mention the lexical sets that students will require in the long term, cannot be easily predicted or restricted, unless the approach taken is predicated on short-term subject-specific survival skills only An interesting dilemma thus emerges: Should practitioners try to find at least a partially universal literacy of some type, or they really have no alternative to engaging in the substantial task of identifying the multiple literacies that individual students in particularized contexts might 110 TESOL QUARTERLY need to master? Much may also depend on the entrance level of students, and it cannot be overlooked in this regard that much EAP is remedial in nature and delivered to students whose general level of English is extremely weak Practical issues of time and expense cannot be ignored, either A major problem with more specialized instructional modes is that they can have a marked impact on the economics of instructional delivery Instructors with hybrid classes meanwhile may struggle to provide meaningful levels of specialization And even subjects as superficially specific as mechanical engineering may start to appear broader rather than narrower once a group of students is engaged, in say, individualized thesis research True, in today’s technology-rich environment, such difficulties are not insurmountable, but they are substantial nevertheless It is true also that though one function of research is to unravel what distinguishes different fields and genres, another function is to find similarities and generalities that will facilitate instruction in an imperfect world These are issues of emphasis and balance, to be sure, but for hard-pressed instructors, Coxhead’s flawed AWL may yet continue for a while longer to be of more practical service than the specialized approach suggested by Hyland and Tse Having noted this, though, certain issues concerning the AWL cannot be overlooked Quite apart from Hyland and Tse’s questions concerning corpora collection, a more fundamental problem concerns Coxhead’s assumption that the AWL could be tagged on to the older and far from problem-free General Service List (GSL) What has since been noted, despite the high coverage of text that the AWL provides, is the occurrence not only of too many terms deriving from the fields of law and commerce, as Hyland and Tse note, but items that not intuitively appear to belong to academia at all, such as job, to give just one example Further examination reveals that words like examine that look intuitively academic appear in the GSL, and words like dissertation that look like they should appear in the AWL not appear anywhere The AWL should perhaps not have been called the Academic Word List at all, and there remains a possibility that what Coxhead actually did was to extract from an academic corpus many word families that simply occur with relatively high frequency in general English The conclusion therefore that Hyland and Tse (2007) draw—that “the AWL might not be as general as it was intended to be” (p 235)—is by no means the whole story In some cases, the AWL may actually be a great deal more general than it was supposed to be Such, at any rate, are the perils of using the GSL as a foundation on which to build more specialized lists What might be extremely useful for many practitioners, then, would be the production of a face-lifted GSL Not only might such a list finally be purged of the accretions that Hyland and Tse, among others note THE FORUM 111 (such as shilling), it might also incorporate many of the items that currently occur in the AWL Such a list might also finally constitute a critical learning mass of lexical items that would form a better foundation not only for general English but for the subsequent production of the more specialized types of list espoused by Hyland and Tse The notion of academia is a broad one, and it cannot easily sustain a generic word list Nor is it news that what really identifies academic discourse are not discrete lexical items but lexical bundles and the whole molecular attractions of collocation and co-occurrence Furthermore, generating lists of most frequent words does not automatically generate a syllabus but merely a further round of questions: If the boundaries of lexical competence are defined by the fluent and accurate use of high frequency lexis, should not such lexis be fundamental to a course of instruction? Or, alternatively, if such high frequency lexis is the most likely lexis to be naturally acquired anyway, is it not in the nature of pedagogical artifice to concentrate on building knowledge and skills in areas where natural learning is unlikely to occur? Hyland and Tse (2007) refer in passing to Flowerdew’s (1993) point that “general academic vocabulary plays a largely supportive role and the words are ‘not likely to be glossed by the content teacher’” (p 236) One obvious implication of this point, though, is that much specific subject-related lexis will indeed be glossed by the subject specialist and that the EAP practitioner might therefore still be better used in helping with the scaffolding The debate continues and so too should the research ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to acknowledge the insights of my colleagues Nilgun Hanciog˘ lu and Steve Neufeld THE AUTHOR John Eldridge teaches in the General Education Department of the Eastern Mediterranean University, Famagusta, Northern Cyprus His interests include ELT management, educational technology, the relationship between learner and teacher autonomy, and lexically orientated approaches to language teaching REFERENCES Bhatia, V K (2002) A generic view of academic discourse In J Flowerdew (Ed.), Academic Discourse (pp 21–39) London: Longman Flowerdew, J (1993) Concordancing as a tool in course design System, 21, 231–244 112 TESOL QUARTERLY Hyland, K., & Tse, P (2007) Is there an “academic vocabulary”? TESOL Quarterly, 41, 235–253 Neufeld, S (2007) Tom Cobb’s Compleat Lexical Tutor Vocab profile English (BNL) Available from http://www.lextutor.ca/vp/bnl/ THE FORUM 113