Integrating Reading and Writing in ESP Teaching to Develop Students ’ Lexis

1. Integrating Reading and Writing in ESP Teaching to Develop Students’ Lexis Sun Feng sunfeng3386@126.com Wang Junju

2. Introduction • After two years of English learning for general purposes, Chinese undergraduate students in economics are required to take the course of EEP (English for Economic Purposes) in addition to two main courses of Microeconomics and Macroeconomics. At present, in most Chinese universities, EEP teachers have to face big classes and teachers’lecturing and translation dominate the whole teaching process. As the result, students’ language output has long been neglected and they have neither enough confidence nor opportunities to express their ideas in English.

3. Therefore, with the intention of improving such status quo and based on Comprehensible Input and Comprehensible Output theories, we introduce to EEP reading class the Length Approach to Writing proposed by Wang Chuming (2000) which has been proved helpful in different perspectives, to investigate the relationship between integrated reading-writing instruction and language learning efficiency from the angle of development of lexis learning.

4. Comprehensible Input Hypothesis • According to Krashen, input that is useful for L2 acquisition must be neither too difficult nor too easy to understand and ought to be tuned just right to learners’ current level, represented as i. The next level is called “i+1”. For i+1 to occur, the input has to be slightly beyond the level at which learners are well proficient. The gap between I and i+1 is bridged by comprehensible input, which is the information drawn from the context and previous experience. The teaching handouts and teachers speech serve as the comprehensible input in this research.

5. Comprehensible Output Hypothesis • Swain (1985; 1995) argues that syntactic processing in the course of generating output is more conducive to L2 learning than merely comprehension of i+1. This view on the role of output in L2 learning is called the COMPREHENSIBLE OUTPUT HYPOTHESIS or the OUTPUT HYPOTHESIS for short. The Output Hypothesis is not so much a negation of the importance of input as a complement and reinforcement of the input-based approaches to L2 acquisition (Izumi and Bigelow 2000). In this research the output channel is writing.

6. Writing and Productive Vocabulary Development • Laufer (1998) claimed that productive vocabulary does not necessarily develop in parallel with receptive vocabulary. Converting receptive vocabulary into productive vocabulary is the final stage of vocabulary learning (Brown and Payne, 1994), and a writing course would be the obvious place for this to happen. Writing allows for greater experimentation with productive use of new words than speaking does, as students have greater use of resources such as dictionaries and time. This extra time which writers have available to them may also enable them to activate less frequent but more appropriate words which are in their passive vocabulary but not yet fully part of their active vocabulary (Corson, 1997, p.699).

7. Sugawara (1992) also found that writing new words in contexts at least once improved learners’confidence in using those words at later dates, and was effective in improving both receptive and productive vocabulary acquisition. • In this research, writing was done with the following two approaches:

8. The Length Approach and the Process Writing Approach • Wang Chuming’s (2000) Length Approach encourages students to write as long as possible. Writing long compositions can help L2 learners improve both their confidence and interest, which has been proved successful in many perspectives. • In this research, the length approach alone can not provide sufficient data to analyze students’ improvement process. Therefore, the process approach has been taken. The students were required to write 3 drafts for each composition and could get teacher’s remarks for each draft.

9. Comprehensible Input and Output------ Reading and Writing • Reading and writing, as much as any pair of subjects, overlap; that is, they clearly depend on many of the same cognitive elements. Given this, it might be possible to teach reading through writing, or vice versa.

10. Reading and writing offer separate perspectives. By processing information both ways (through reading and writing) we could increase our chances of understanding. Writing, because it affords one an insider’s view of this aspect of text, provides a powerful, complementary way of thinking about reading. Similarly, reading a text and writing about it can provide alternative perspectives that deepen one’s understanding of the text. Given this, it is not surprising that many study skills approaches try to combine reading and writing activities in various ways (McGee & Richgels, 1990).

11. However, the cognitive separation of reading and writing also means that the integration of instruction in this area will not automatically lead to learning. Thus, adding writing to the reading curriculum does not necessarily mean that students will improve in reading (Shanahan, 1998). Improved learning is only likely to be the result if reading and writing are combined in appropriate ways. This study tries to explore how reading-writing integration and vocabulary development are related and how to better integrate reading and writing.

12. Methodology • Subjects • The subjects for this research were 81 students from 2 classes at Shandong University of Technology, on a course entitled “English for Economic Purpose”. Their level was roughly intermediate. Because the two classes are similar in CET passing grades, only the compositions of class 1 were analyzed in this article. As the LFP is only stable on compositions of over 200 words, those which fell short of this were excluded from the study, leaving 35 students. In addition, 2 other students copied from other articles. Therefore, only 33 students’ data were qualified to be analyzed.

13. Data collection • The authors first provided the students with some English articles of different economic topics, explained them, asked some eliciting questions and then asked the students to write long compositions on the themes they like. During the one-semester teaching, the students were asked to write on 4themes altogether, for each of which they were expected to write first drafts, second drafts and final drafts. The final drafts should not be less than 500 words. This followed a fairly standard process methodology, with the focus being on generating and structuring ideas, and communicating them effectively.

14. The students’ compositions were typed into the LFP program supplied from the website of one of its authors (Nation, 2001), and LFP ratios were produced. The program comes with word lists of the first 1000 words (K1), the second 1000 words (K2) and the University Word List (UWL). • The authors also interviewed some students concerning their perspectives on this integrated instructional module.

15. Data analysis: Measurement of productive vocabulary in compositions • The Lexical Frequency Profile, or LFP (Laufer and Nation, 1995) has been used. This measurement of productive vocabulary compares the words used in a text to lists of the first 1000 most frequent words of English and the next 1000 most frequent words. A ratio is then produced showing the percentage of words used in the text in these two categories, plus the percentage of words which fall into neither category, i.e. those which are in the level of above the 2000 most frequently used words in English. LFP gives a detailed picture of lexical sophistication and it can discriminate between subjects who use frequent and less frequent vocabulary.

16. To operate the LFP test, a text is typed into the program, which then is able to recognize word forms as members of word families (Laufer, 1995). A word family used here includes the base form plus the inflections and affixes -able, -er, -ish, -less, -ly, -ness, -th, -y, non-, un- (ibid., p. 266), and is based on work by Bauer and Nation (1993). The program then compares the word families used in the text to the word frequency lists to produce the profile. The researcher, when typing the learners’ text, is responsible for ensuring that only those words which are used correctly are entered, and for deleting proper nouns, and correcting obvious spelling slips.”

17. In addition, the program can also analyze more than one composition at the same time, and compare the vocabulary used in each. The first and final drafts of each student were therefore analyzed together to see what words were common to both, what words were used in the first draft but subsequently removed during revision, and what words were added during the revision process.

18. Results • 1. LFPs of First Drafts and Final Drafts • The mean LFPs for the first composition are shown in Table 1. The results in Table 1 show first of all that the total number of word families used by students increased from the first draft to the final draft. This is to be expected, given the extra time available for writing. • As can be seen from the percentages for the LFP ratios, use of words in the K2 range and the UWL range appears to increase during the revision process (from the first draft to the final draft). The differences between the first and final draft were then analyzed.

19. 2. Relationship of lexis in the material and the lexis used in their composition • As could be seen in Table 3 and Table 4, the vocabulary shared by the teaching handouts take a higher percentage in first drafts (UWL:62.50%)than in the final drafts (UWL: .58.90%).In the UWL unique to the final drafts, 34.90% have been found in the teaching handouts.

20. Discussion • 1.Intra-students analysis • Firstly, a tendency was seen for the proportion of less frequent words to increase from the first to the final drafts. A likewise drop in the proportion of below 1000 words was also noticed. Although the increase in percentage is too significant，the increase in the numbers is significant. It appears that during the process of revising their work, students do indeed use a greater proportion of more sophisticated words in the final drafts than in the first drafts.

21. Although a more detailed analysis of the nature of the revisions was not carried out, the overall impression of them seemed to be that the revisions tended to be entire sentences and paragraphs inserted into the text, rather than the alteration of individual words already written.

22. 2. Inter-students analysis • Large standard deviations for these figures, however, showed a correspondingly large degree of variation within the group. The composition written using the process approach shows not just their everyday range of vocabulary, but also the extra work and extra resources that the students have been able to employ during its production. Therefore, a student’s attitude toward writing is of primary importance.

23. Dependence on teaching handouts • Figures in Table 5 show that when the students are writing the first drafts, they heavily depend on the teaching handouts to get the UWL(62.50%). In newly added words, although they still make good use of the teaching handouts to get the more sophisticated words, the percentage is much lower (34.90%). This was because in later revisions, students have more time and a greater use of other resources (e.g., dictionaries). Therefore, we can conclude that the teaching handouts serve as important scaffolding throughout the writing process to extend student’s more sophisticated productive vocabulary, especially at the beginning phase. Questionaire survey on students’ writing reflections also supports this conclusion.

24. Conclusion • The results showed that the LFPs of the revisions did show a higher percentage of more sophisticated vocabulary than those of the first draft. It is therefore assumed that integrative reading-writing approach can be a useful means of helping students to stretch their vocabulary.

25. My teaching suggestions could be summarized as four principles. • 1.Gradual progress principle • Writing improvement is a long process. As shown in the data, the increase in LFP ratio is not significant in the first composition. If teachers can encourage students to be more patient in writing, it would be very helpful to increase students’ • 2.Open theme principle • If students are allowed to write what they are interested in, they would be more motivated during the whole process.

26. 3. Scaffolding principle • Scaffolding is especially important at the initial phase of writing. It is suggested to provide some access of English materials such as the handouts in this research. • 4. Learner autonomy principle • Learners are the writers and should be encouraged to take a more active role in the writing process. After the teacher leads them to the water, it is the learners that do the drinking and washing.

27. It is hoped that the evidence from this study along with the pedagogical suggestions earlier could be useful for teachers particularly in EFL situations. The reading-writing integrative approach can be a useful methodology not only for improving the writing skills of learners, but also for improving their more general language ability, in particular aiding the development of their vocabulary.

28. That is all. • Thank you for listening!