Phil Bennett

English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) programs are growing in popularity in Japanese universities. Accordingly, there is a need to examine the linguistic demands of EMI instruction. The value of lexical knowledge is well known, but there is also growing recognition of the importance of metaphor in expressing abstract concepts in academic disciplines. Lack of metaphor awareness is known to affect learner comprehension, but no systematic studies of metaphor in Japanese university EMI courses have yet been conducted. This study used a two-million-word corpus of EMI course materials to identify common metaphors used to describe key concepts in applied linguistics, literature, philosophy, and political science. The findings confirm that metaphor is frequently used in EMI instruction. Results suggest that in applied linguistics, philosophy, and political science 10 to 25% of metaphor use can be accounted for by 9 to 12 conceptual metaphors, while literature appears to draw on a wider r...

Learners in academic English environments face considerable demands on their lexical knowledge. The problem is more than just the acquisition of a large vocabulary; they must also develop an awareness of the range of meanings that words can convey. Academic discourse is known to make frequent use of metaphorical vocabulary to express abstract notions. This article reports on a two-semester investigation into learner production of conventional metaphorical vocabulary in an anthropology course. Analysis of written output revealed that control group metaphor use correlated strongly with overall proficiency, but that experimental group learners responded to the treatment in a more complex fashion.

English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) programs are growing in popularity in Japanese universities. Accordingly, there is a need to examine the linguistic demands of EMI instruction. The value of lexical knowledge is well known, but there is also growing recognition of the importance of metaphor in expressing abstract concepts in academic disciplines. Lack of metaphor awareness is known to affect learner comprehension, but no systematic studies of metaphor in Japanese university EMI courses have yet been conducted. This study used a two- million-word corpus of EMI course materials to identify common metaphors used to describe key concepts in applied linguistics, literature, philosophy, and political science. The findings confirm that metaphor is frequently used in EMI instruction. Results suggest that in applied linguistics, philosophy, and political science 10 to 25% of metaphor use can be accounted for by 9 to 12 conceptual metaphors, while literature appears to draw on a wider range of source terms.

English-medium instruction (EMI) is a growing trend in Japan, and one common challenge of EMI implementation is providing adequate language-proficiency preparation for students, including the development of general and academic vocabulary. This study used a corpus of approximately 500,000 words taken from reading texts used in EMI courses at one university in order to evaluate the New General Service List (NGSL) and the New Academic Word List (NAWL) as study tools for students in this university’s program. Results showed that the NGSL provided 87.7% coverage of the corpus, a marked improvement over the original General Service List, which provided only 79.7% coverage. The NAWL performed less well, providing only an additional 3.0% coverage beyond that of the NGSL alone. Also, a full 17.4% of NAWL words did not appear in the corpus. This finding calls into question the value of the NAWL as a study tool for this program. 日本における英語による専門教育（EMI）は、増加傾向にある。EMIを実施する上で大学が取り組むべきことの一つは、学生の語学力強化...

This paper provides and explains the criteria by which the first eight 1,000-word frequency bands of the Japanese bilingual Vocabulary Size Test (VST) were revised. The VST (Nation & Beglar, 2007) was designed as a measure of vocabulary size for language learners. It was originally produced and validated in a monolingual format, but in recent years several bilingual versions have also been made. These variants may yield more accurate results, because they avoid conflating vocabulary knowledge with ability to decode answer choices in the L2. However, they have received little scrutiny beyond initial piloting and may therefore benefit from further examination and refinement (Nguyen & Nation, 2011). This paper describes the revision of the first eight 1,000-word frequency bands of the Japanese bilingual VST with the goal of increasing the test’s unidimensionality and accuracy. The revisions (a) removed English loanwords from the answer choices to prevent examinees from correctly respon...

The choice of word counting units (i.e. word family, flemma, or lemma) is of great importance in vocabulary list and test creation, as there are assumptions underpinning the use of each. Flemma-based counting assumes that if a learner can understand the meaning of a word in one part of speech (POS), they can also understand its meaning when the same word form is used in another POS. A previous quantitative study showed that such an assumption is not always valid, but it did not provide reasons as to why. Therefore, this article presents an interview study probing the challenges learners face when they fail to understand the meaning of a known word form used in a new POS. The data were collected through one-on-one interviews with 16 university students in Japan, where they were asked to demonstrate comprehension of target words embedded in short sentences, as well as to explain how they approached the task. The interviews revealed that factors related to both the words and the learne...

Important note about size and levels tests Measuring vocabulary size and interpreting vocabulary size test scores Vocabulary size tests are intended to estimate the total number of words a learner knows. This estimate can be useful when comparing groups of learners, measuring long-term vocabulary growth, or providing “one kind of goal for learners of English as a second or foreign language” (Nation, 2013, p. 522). The Vocabulary Size Test (VST) (Nation & Beglar, 2007), for example, is a measure of written receptive word knowledge based on word family frequency estimates derived from the spoken subsection of the BNC (Nation, 2006). Each item on the VST presents the target word first in isolation followed by a non-defining context sentence, with four answer-choices presented in either English or in the learners’ L1. Results of the VST among samples with a wide range in ability have shown that the test is able to reliably distinguish between learners of different vocabulary proficiency...

This paper describes the development and initial validation of a Japanese-English bilingual version of the New General Service List Test (NGSLT; Stoeckel & Bennett, 2015). The New General Service List (NGSL; Browne, 2013) consists of 2,800 high frequency words and is intended to provide maximal coverage of texts for learners of English. The NGSLT is a diagnostic instrument designed to identify gaps in knowledge of words on the NGSL. The NGSLT is a multiple-choice test that consists of 5 levels, each assessing knowledge of 20 randomly sampled words from a 560-word frequency-based level of the NGSL. A bilingual version of the NGSLT was developed to minimize the risk of conflating vocabulary knowledge with understanding of the answer choices. A validation study with 382 Japanese high school and university learners found the instrument to be reliable (α = .97) and unidimensional and to demonstrate good fit to the Rasch model. 本論文では New General Service List (NGSL) に基づく語彙サイズテスト(NGSLT)の日本語...

Learners in academic English environments face considerable demands on their lexical knowledge. The problem is more than just the acquisition of a large vocabulary; they must also develop an awareness of the range of meanings that words can convey. Academic discourse is known to make frequent use of metaphorical vocabulary to express abstract notions. This article reports on a two-semester investigation into learner production of conventional metaphorical vocabulary in an anthropology course. Analysis of written output revealed that control group metaphor use correlated strongly with overall proficiency, but that experimental group learners responded to the treatment in a more complex fashion.

English Medium Instruction (EMI) programs, in which learners acquire content knowledge while working in a foreign language, pose considerable lexical demands. As well as low-frequency vocabulary, academic discourse makes frequent use of metaphor (Nation, 2013; Steen, Dorst, Herrmann, Kaal, Krennmayr & Pasma, 2010), and learners must therefore develop both their breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge. Cognitive linguists argue that raising awareness of the motivation behind metaphorical expressions facilitates learning (Boers & Lindstromberg, 2008), and the present study adopted this approach in an EMI anthropology course.
Participants were 46 low to intermediate proficiency Japanese university students in two sections of an anthropology class. An experimental group (n = 23) studied metaphors related to course themes, while a control group (n = 23) completed vocabulary building exercises. Participants completed weekly writing assignments with identical prompts on class themes. Learner corpora were created from these texts, and L1-English anthropology writing from the British Academic Written English corpus was used for comparison. All texts were analysed for metaphor using the Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit (Steen et al., 2010). Research questions were:
1) Do learners who experience metaphor awareness-raising activities produce more metaphor than a control group?
2) Is there a relationship between learner proficiency and amount of metaphor produced in either condition?
3) Do language learners make greater use of high- or low-frequency metaphorical vocabulary than L1 writers?
While there was no significant difference in metaphor production between the two groups (U = 244.5, z = 0.428, p = 0.667, r = 0.06), the Spearman correlation between metaphor use and proficiency was 0.758 for control group learners and 0.361 for the experimental group. When metaphors were classified into Corpus of Contemporary American English frequency bands, both learner groups were found to significantly overuse high-frequency and underuse low-frequency vocabulary compared with L1 writers.

Learners in academic English environments face considerable demands on their lexical knowledge. The problem is more than just the acquisition of a large vocabulary; they must also develop an awareness of the range of meanings that words can convey. Academic discourse is known to make frequent use of metaphorical vocabulary to express abstract notions. This paper reports on a two-semester investigation into learner production of conventional metaphorical vocabulary in an anthropology course. Analysis of written output revealed that control group metaphor use correlated strongly with overall proficiency, but that experimental group learners responded to the treatment in a more complex fashion.

Research has shown that metaphor awareness is important for learners in academic contexts, and studies are now beginning to investigate the explicit teaching of metaphorical vocabulary and how learners add this to their written production (Boers, 2004; Littlemore et al., 2013). Word frequency is also known to exhibit a powerful influence on vocabulary learning, and some studies are beginning to consider the frequency of figurative language as a potential influence on learning (Macis & Schmitt, 2016). However, the frequency effects of the L1 on metaphor production have yet to receive much attention. The present exploratory study seeks to make a small contribution in this regard by examining the priming influences due to frequency in both the L1 and L2 as well as classroom exposure on learners' production of metaphorical vocabulary.