The vocabulary of L1 senior secondary science textbooks: creating word lists to inform EFL teaching of science-oriented students

Abstract

L2 studies examining the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension have found that many EFL students entering university lack the vocabulary knowledge to comprehend L1 academic texts even after at least six years of English language study (e.g., Hui, 2004; Joyce, 2003; Li, 2008). Science-oriented undergraduate students and other non-English major students in particular have been found to have relatively small vocabulary sizes: knowledge of only the first 1,000 to 2,000 most frequent words of English (e.g., Cobb & Horst, 2001; Hsu, 2014; Nurweni & Read, 1999). However, the reason for this difficulty in comprehending texts at the tertiary level may not only be due to the students’ poor vocabulary size but also specifically to the types of English words they had been exposed to and learned in the EFL secondary school classroom. Therefore, in order to inform EFL teaching of science-oriented, university-bound students, the present study aimed to 1) determine the vocabulary demands of L1 senior secondary (i.e., Year 11 and Year 12; for students aged 16 to 18 years) biology, chemistry and physics textbooks written to prepare students in Australia for Year 12 exams; 2) identify the most frequent, wide-range words occurring across and within the biology, chemistry and physics textbooks (also referred to as pure science textbooks in the present study) in order to create a science specific and three subject specific word lists; 3) evaluate the coverage of the lists over various pure science and non-pure science text types; and 4) compare the lists to existing academic and science specific word lists made for use in TESOL. This study found, inter alia, that knowledge of the words making up the science specific and subject specific word lists may enable the L2 reader to obtain the minimal lexical coverage needed for assisted comprehension of pure science textbooks at the senior secondary level and to a lesser extent of those at the tertiary level.