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This book highlights the importance of English academic vocabulary for success at university and explores written tasks as effective pedagogical tools to promote the acquisition of academic words. The book reviews germane and recent SLA, psycholinguistic, corpus linguistics, and L2 writing research to underscore the challenges associated with the learning of academic words. Then, it reports on three empirical studies conducted in the Polish context. The first study develops a reliable tool to assess the knowledge of academic vocabulary of undergraduate learners. The second and third studies investigate the learning of academic words after the writing of sentences and argumentative essays, and discuss the role of cognition as a mediator of such learning. The book also provides an accessible introduction to linear mixed-effect models, a powerful, reliable, and flexible statistical technique that has been gaining popularity among SLA and psycholinguistics researchers.
List of contents
1: The Importance of General and Academic Vocabulary.- 2: Incidental Lexical Learning.- 3: The Writing Cycle and Cognitive Processes that May Affect Learning.- 4: An Overview of the Research Project.- 5: Inferential statistics and linear mixed models.- 6: Study 1 The Assessment of Academic Vocabulary: Developing a Reliable Academic Placement Tool.- 7: Discussion of findings for Study 1.- 8: Study 2 Lexical Learning through Writing Sentences and Timed essays.- 9: Study 3 Lexical Learning through Writing Sentences, Timed and Untimed essays.- 10: Discussion for Studies 2 and 3.
About the author
Breno Barreto Silva: Breno has a TESOL certificate and diploma and has been teaching English and Portuguese for over 20 years in three different countries. Breno has been teaching academic writing, research methodology and statistics for 3 years. Breno holds two master degrees (linguistics and teaching) and a Ph.D. in applied linguistics. Breno has published several scientific papers directly connected to the topic of the book.
