Description
Teaching English Geographical Vocabulary with the Use of a Corpus-based List and Pedagogical Translation (Andreja Drašler).
My PhD research aims to deepen our understanding of how to improve geography students’ English vocabulary, addressing both what specialised vocabulary to teach and how to teach it. The purpose of this study is two-fold: to create, for the first time, a specialised vocabulary list, and to examine the role of pedagogical translation in the context of English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP), in the Reading and Interpretation of English Technical Texts for Geographers course at the Department of Geography, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. First, I will form specialised corpora of scientific and professional texts in physical geography and human geography, to ensure appropriately broad coverage. For corpus analysis, the online corpus tool Sketch Engine will be employed to extract keywords (single words and multi-word terms), and serve as the basis for designing a specialised vocabulary list and other teaching materials for the Reading and Interpretation of English Technical Texts for Geographers course. The second research aim will be to examine whether geography students perform better at tasks testing their knowledge of specialised vocabulary in English when taught with pedagogical translation. A mixed-method approach will be employed to investigate the role of pedagogical translation in vocabulary instruction. Pedagogical intervention will be implemented to test the effects of pedagogical translation as opposed to a monolingual approach when teaching vocabulary, based on a one-group pretest-posttest research design. As yet, no study has examined the effects of pedagogical translation on specialised vocabulary gains in the context of ESAP.
