Essential Academic Vocabulary - SFUca - Simon Fraser University必要的学术词汇sfuca -西蒙·弗雷泽大学.doc

Essential Academic Vocabulary by Helen Huntley Houghton Mifflin Company 2006 Colleges and universities are teeming with vocabulary books these days, as is this newsletter with their reviews. Like Schmitt and Schmitt’s Focus on Vocabulary reviewed previously Helen Huntley’s Essential Academic Vocabulary utilizes Averil Coxhead’s Academic Word List as a basis for a wide range of vocabulary activities. Geared both for native speakers and ESLs (though the weblinks, perhaps tellingly, contain “esl” in their urls), Essential Academic Vocabulary uses research on vocabulary cited in Schmitt and Schmitt’s “Vocabulary Notebooks: Theoretical Underpinnings and Practical Suggestions” (1995). This research comes from a variety of sources and perhaps because of this, seems at times to be going into opposite directions, e.g. a recommendation that students use word pairs to increase learning efficiency seems to go against the advice that “the best way to remember new words is to incorporate them into language that is already known” (Schmitt Schmitt, as cited in Huntley, 2006, p.). Also somewhat controversial is the information that “The deeper the mental processing used when learning a word, the more likely that a student will remember it.” (Schmitt Schmitt, as cited in Huntley, 2006, p. vii). Concerns related to this point are summarized in Hulstijn and Laufer (2001) who propose the involvement load hypothesis as an alternative; they found that exercises which require learners to retrieve vocabulary in writing compositions resulted in greater retention of words learned than either simply reading or doing a gapfill exercise. This is because writing requires greater involvement—a combination of need, search, and evaluation of suitable vocabulary. Folse (2006) goes a step further, having determined that repeated exposure is a stronger factor than involvement load in promoting retention of words learned. Huntley has taken great care to cover her theoretical bases with a wide ra