The Study of Selected Vocabulary in Context – Using Technology to Motivate Learners

The UGRU Target Language Corpus is composed of electronic versions of current Maths, ICT and English texts used by UGRU students in their different courses during their first year at university. The corpus is accessed by teachers involved in the project (as materials writers) using a computer programme called a concordancer, in this case Concordance v3.2 (Watt, 2004) This is text analysis software which, among other things, produces Key Word In Context (KWIC) output. The materials writers then select up to 15 representative examples of the target word in context and design activities to help students discover the meaning, understand the use of the word and notice the patterns that surround it. The words used come from the institution’s Vocabulary To Learn (VTL) lists that are compiled according to a word’s frequency, range and saliency both in the UGRU Target Language Corpus and in the English language as a whole. This is done using Range software (Nation and Heatley, 1996). The need to notice ‘grammaticalised lexis’ Secondary school graduates moving into higher education in the UAE generally need to augment both their lexical and grammatical bases in order to cope with their faculty courses. The UGRU Concordance website exists to accelerate lexical growth while promoting the noticing of ‘word grammar’ as an integral part of vocabulary study. The rationale is based on the premise that students learn to use words best by encountering multiple examples of a word used in novel contexts and being guided to notice how that word is used.