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Running head: USING CALL FOR AN ESP BUSINESS COURSE

Vocabulary Learning: Using CALL for an ESP Business Course

Albatool Abalkheel, Tara Brandenburg, and Devon Jancin

Colorado State University

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USING CALL FOR AN ESP BUSINESS COURSE

Vocabulary Learning: Using CALL For An ESP Business Course

INTO Colorado State University's (INTO CSU) academic Pathways and English

language programs prepare students for entry to an undergraduate or graduate degree

program at a US university. Students can earn academic credits that apply toward CSU

degree programs. According to INTO CSU's English language programs (2014), these

programs are designed for “students who want to become confident English speakers by

studying at a US university” (http://www.intohigher.com). Students Studying in the INTO

CSU Pathways program who want to major in business at CSU need to develop their ability

to read and comprehend a variety of business textbooks and other materials related to the

field (N. Berry, personal communication, November 6, 2013). In order to attain a high level

of reading comprehension, an extensive knowledge of vocabulary is required (McCarten,

2007).

This project was designed to help Business Pathway students learn a set of important

vocabulary items related to their field and to evaluate and assess the depth of their learning.

To help address the vocabulary needs of learners, my colleagues and I compiled a corpus of

business textbooks in order to create a vocabulary word list for this course, as well as created

a prototype of a vocabulary learning webpage to be used in the course. This paper describes

the theoretical part of this project, its methodology, and a rationale for the assessment tasks.

Project Rationale

Second and foreign language learners who want to be enrolled in a specific major at a

university that has English as the medium of instruction need to develop their vocabulary

related to the field. However, Konstantakis (2007) found that most ESL/EFL students

majoring in business at English-speaking universities “have little or no training in Business

English specifically or in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) in general” and they lack

adequate vocabulary that will facilitate their comprehension of business course books (p. 80).

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http://www.intohigher.com/


Although some of those students may be exposed frequently based words from the General

Service List (GSL) (i.e. the K-2 most common words) and the Academic Word List (AWL),

they lack a specialized business-oriented vocabulary list.

Hsu (2011) analyzed a corpus of English-medium business textbooks (7.2 million

running words) and a corpus of business research articles (7.62 million tokens) to investigate

the vocabulary size required for EFL learners to be able to comprehend a business research

article and a business textbook. She found that students need to know the most frequent 3,500

word families to be able to comprehend a business textbook (95% lexical coverage), and the

most frequent 5,000 word families to comprehend a business research article (at 98%).

Konstantakis (2007) created a list that is made specifically of business-related words

through analyzing a corpus of 33 course books in RANGE, “a program developed by Nation

(2002) and used to create the AWL” (Coxhead, 2002, as cited in Al-Seghayer, 2001). During

the analysis, he chose words that appeared in five textbooks and removed “all proper names,

numericals, Latin words, nationalities, acronyms, and interjections” (p. 87). Finally, he ended

up with a list of 480 word families. Combining this list with GSL and AWL increases the

percentage of lexical coverage of a business-related corpus 2.79 % “beyond the 90%

provided by the GSL and the AWL” (Konstantakis, 2007, p. 87). This present project is

designed to provide more words to these lists and to help students learn the words that help

them success in BUS100 through learning words that will face them in this course, but that

have not been learned in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) business Pathways program.

Technology and Vocabulary Learning

Learning word families and vocabulary items in business can be technology-

supported. Nakata (2008) conducted a study comparing vocabulary learning with word lists,

word cards, and computers (PC). Participants in the study were 226 Japanese high school

students. The study showed that the PC group significantly outperformed the List group on

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the delayed post-test and that the List group's “successful recall rates” for half of the

vocabulary items were “significantly lower than those of the Card or PC group” (Nakata,

2008, p. 3).

Correlational analysis indicated that the time invested in learning and the subsequent

post-test scores did not correlate significantly for the List and Card groups, suggesting that it

was the PCs that influenced the scores, not the amount of time spent studying. Furthermore,

participants were asked to complete a questionnaire to reveal their attitudes towards each

method. The questionnaire showed that computers “were evaluated more favorably than lists

or cards” (Nakata, 2008, p. 3). This study highly encourages integrating technology with

business words that EFL/ESL learners need to learn, to increase learning and assess

vocabulary knowledge.

Among the technology-supported programs are Quizlet (www.quizlet.com) and Anki.

They are based on integrating computer-based flashcard programs into vocabulary learning.

Altiner (2011) conducted a study investigating the extent of help that Anki provided thirteen

college-level ESL learners in improving their vocabulary knowledge of the Academic Word

List. The researcher designed an academic vocabulary dictionary of 210 academic words to

be used by those learners every day for three weeks, ten minutes per day. The results showed

that learners’ scores increased when using this program. They also felt that “the academic

learning process with Anki [was] useful and indicated that their academic vocabulary

improved since they started using Anki” (Altiner, 2011, p. 49).

Quizlet also has provided computational advantages for learners in learning

vocabulary and assessing their knowledge through enabling them to have flash cards with

word associations, images, sound files and spelling activities. Runhaar, van der Zande, and

Ursella (2012) conducted a study investigating the relationship between vocabulary learning

and reading difficulties among first-year bilingual high school learners at Hermann

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Wesselink College. They implemented an intervention based on using Quizlet to learn

relevant new vocabulary before beginning a history class. They found that students in the

intervention group spent less time on vocabulary and general language questions in class than

the control group. This study suggests that Quizlet may be an important resource that can

assist students with independent vocabulary learning.

Rationale for the Assessment Tasks

The practice activities in Quizlet are related to the module content in their focusing on

vocabulary learning. Written answer, multiple-choice and True-False questions are all

effective techniques in measuring student vocabulary knowledge and multiple-choice

questions provide reliability for the test, as stated by Milton (2009). Learning vocabulary

through flashcards is one of the most widely used techniques in language learning. The

advantage of this technique is that students can print the target words in the module and carry

them whenever they go. “Flashcards available for the students both in the class and outside in

their extracurricular time” and it was found that students’ vocabulary learning improved

when they used flashcards (Basoglu & Akdemir, 2010, p. 1).

Spelling is used because it has a critical role in developing vocabulary. Research

showed that “spelling knowledge is not only an important tool for writing, but that it also

plays important roles in students' vocabulary development, reading comprehension, and

reading rate and fluency” (Perfetti, 1985; Templeton & Bear, 1992, as cited in Templeton &

Pikulski, 1999).

Methodology

The department of Business at CSU chooses two textbooks for this project: The

Future of Business: The Essentials, by Gitman and McDaniel (2008), and Foundations of

Business, by Pride, Hughes, and Kapoor (2008). These textbooks are designed for

introductory business courses and they are commonly used in the course. We created a

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corpus, a collection of writings that people use to study and describe language, using

systematic sampling from the two business textbooks listed above. This system is explained

in the next lines.

One hundred and eight pages were used, creating a corpus of 36,715 words. Then, we

ran the corpus through Lextutor Compleat Vocab Profile (http://www.lextutor.ca) (see

Appendix A). We got lists of words arranged according to their frequency level and then we

compiled a list of the first 30 most frequent words to create vocabulary activities (see

Appendix B). The rationale for choosing these words was based on the fact that the

curriculum states that students at the Pathways level of the program are supposed to know

most words in the K1, K2 and Academic Word List, i.e. 2570 words. However, in BUS100

they will encounter words from K3. To help them overcome this gap, we decided to select 30

vocabulary items from business-specific words from K3.

Finally, we created a webpage (http://businessvocabulary.weebly.com), which

consists of three modules to present the selected vocabulary items used in different contexts.

The words were divided between the three modules based on their appearance in K3. Each

module provides a link to a set of practice activities created on (http://quizlet.com/). At the

end of each module, students are instructed to take and to print the test generated by Quizlet

to turn into the teacher for credit.

We decided to use Quizlet activities as the primary focus of our modules because this

program has significant effects on vocabulary learning (Altiner, 2011; Nakata, 2008;

Runhaar, van der Zande, & Ursella, 2012). Quizlet website employs a variety of activities,

including flashcards, speller, as well as a variety of fun and interactive learning games. The

website also includes a vocabulary test over each group of vocabulary words that presents

questions in a variety of formats, such as flash cards, two game-like approaches, fill-in-the

blanks, “Voice Race”, and “Voice Scatter”, which are designed for pronunciation practice.

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http://www.lextutor.ca/


Voice Race requires the user to say the target word into the microphone before the definition

disappears, while Voice Scatter requires the user to produce correct pronunciation of the

target word with its definition. There is an available option for printing the quiz results. The

following are print screens for some of these activities:

a. Flashcards

b. Test

Summary

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This group project for the Lexicon course was conducted after the invitation of INTO

CSU's to participate in the development of an ESP Business curriculum to be offered as a

Pathway course. We took this opportunity to create a vocabulary-learning module that

promotes learning words that help students success in BUS100 through learning words that

will encounter them in this course, but that have not been learned in English for Specific

Purposes (ESP) business Pathways program. In this project I learned how to create a corpus

and demonstrates my understanding that Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL). It

made me interested in the multiple uses of CALL in the L2 classroom. Now, I look forward

to being able to create similar module for some of the course in my university in Saudi

Arabia, i.e. Qassim University, to enhance my students' learning experiences.

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References

Al-Seghayer, K. (2001). The effect of multimedia annotation modes on L2 vocabulary

acquisition: A comparative study. Language Learning & Technology,5(1), 202-232.

Altiner, C. (2011). Integrating a computer-based flashcard program into academic

vocabulary learning. Retrieved from Iowa State University’s Graduate Theses and

Dissertations (10160).

Basoglu, E. B., & Akdemir, O. (2010). A Comparison of Undergraduate Students' English

Vocabulary Learning: Using Mobile Phones and Flash Cards. Turkish Online Journal

of Educational Technology-TOJET, 9(3), 1-7.

Gitman, L. J. & McDaniel, C. (2005). The Future of Business: The Essentials. Mason, OH:

Thomson South-Western.

Hsu, W. (2011). The vocabulary thresholds of business textbooks and business research

articles for EFL learners. English for Specific Purposes, 30(4), 247-257.

Konstantakis, N. (2007). Creating a business word list for teaching Business English. ELIA,

7, 79-102.

McCarten, J. (2007). Teaching vocabulary: Lessons from the corpus, lessons for the

classroom. Cambridge University Press.

Milton, J. (2009). Measuring second language vocabulary. New York: Multilingual Matters.

Nakata, T. (2008). English vocabulary learning with word lists, word cards and computers:

Implications from cognitive psychology research for optimal spaced learning. ReCALL,

20(1), 3.

Pride, W., Hughes, R.J. & Kapoor, J.R. (2008). Foundations of Business (2nd Ed). Mason,

OH: South-Western Cenage Learning.

Runhaar, G. J., van der Zande, S. M., & Ursella, E. G. E. (2012). Online vocabulary learning

for bilingual secondary school pupils: An intervention study with first-year learners at

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the Hermann Wesselink College. Retrieved from

http://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/250577

Templeton, S. & Pikulski, J. J. (1999). Building the foundations of literacy: The importance

of vocabulary and spelling development. Retrieved from

http://www.eduplace.com/rdg/hmsv/expert/research.html

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http://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/250577

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