Academic Words In The New Standard College English

Vocabulary acquisition cannot be realized without input. Textbooks are one of the main vocabulary input resources for domestic college students and core contents of learning and testing(Liu Hua‘ni, 2013); however, few empirical studies are done to evaluate learning opportunities provided by textbooks and explore the input frequency of words in textbooks on students‘ vocabulary acquisition. With the view of the rising status of English for Academic Purpose(EAP) in current college English instruction, this empirical study, based on the theories of hypotheses on input and frequency, is designed to analyze what learning opportunity of academic words is provided in a currently used series of textbooks and investigate the input frequency effect on English as the Foreign Language(EFL) learners‘ academic words acquisition.Academic words in the present study are all from the 570-item Academic Word List(AWL) that Coxhead(2000) produces based on her self-constructed academic corpus. Evidence for the input frequency effect on subjects‘ academic words acquisition is sought through analyzing the proportion of academic words in the Lexical Frequency Profile(LFP) of the New Standard College English(Integrated Course), in comparing their vocabulary gains among different word frequency levels, different parts of speech and different categories of students. The statistical techniques employed for analyses are descriptive statistics, one way repeated-measure ANOVA, Pearson correlations and regression. Through the interpretation of the quantitative and qualitative results, we can generate the following conclusions:1) In terms of the examined series of course books — the New Standard College English(Integrated Course), we can find a favorable learning opportunity of academic words is provided in the number of academic word families appearing in the textbooks, their frequency distribution, and the word in-depth knowledge.2) The relation between input frequency of academic words and their acquisition rate is proportional, i.e. the more the input frequency an academic word has, the higher its acquisition rate. But it is never a determinant one.3) The performance of the input frequency effect renders quite different among academic words of low, middle and high frequency levels, different parts of speech, and different categories of students. These factors include notice, salience, word commonness, word length and complexity, synformy, intrinsic property of nouns, verbs and adjectives, learners‘ different learning strategies and motivations.Based on the conclusions above, some pedagogical implications are advocated as follows: on the one hand, besides adjusting and controlling the occurrences of new words in the texts so as to ensure learners‘ contact of them, more attention should be paid to the collocation of words in the textbook designing process, which is an aspect to realize contextual richness and will be conducive to vocabulary acquisition; on the other hand, both teachers and students should have an understanding of the function of the input frequency effect. Besides encouraging students to make full use of textbooks to benefit vocabulary learning, teachers should positively use other resources to replenish the deficiency of textbooks‘ vocabulary input.