Vocabulary Profiles of Authentic Texts used by Upper Secondary English teachers

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Vocabulary Profiles of

Authentic Texts used by Upper

Secondary English teachers

A lexical analysis of authentic texts used in EFL

classrooms

Independent Project

Author: Jonathan Ståhlberg

Supervisor: Charlotte Hommerberg Examiner: Marie Källkvist

Term: HT20 Subject: 2ENÄ2E Level: G3

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Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to investigate whether the vocabulary in authentic texts used by upper secondary English teachers teaching the course English 7 reach the expectations set by the Swedish National Agency for Education and the CEFR. This was done by analysing 26 texts contributed from five teachers with vocabulary profile web tools such as Text Inspector and Compleat Lexical Tutor. The analysis focused on word frequency and the CEFR levels.. The word frequency results showed that the vocabulary difficulty of teachers’ texts deviated slightly of being too simple or difficult for English 7 students, while the CEFR results showed that the vocabulary difficulty was too advanced for English 7 students. Although the results deviated from one another, the vocabulary difficulty of the teachers’ texts was often similar to each other. Furthermore, the results showed that the vocabulary difficulty often variated between text genres. The study, therefore, reasoned that the English 7 teachers enact their agency by selecting texts that they not only believe are suitable for their students but also will be suitable for students with different language proficiencies. The study concluded that English 7 teachers select texts of similar vocabulary difficulty and that English 7 students read authentic texts that contain advanced vocabulary that goes beyond the expectations of the CEFR. The study also suggested that further research should investigate how the CEFR should be interpreted and that similar studies should include a closer engagement with the teachers to obtain their views on how and why they select particular authentic texts.

Key words

Authentic Texts, Teacher Agency, Vocabulary Acquisition, Vocabulary profile

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Appendices

Appendix I – Contacting E-mail to Fellow students and University Teachers Appendix II – Contacting E-mail to Participants

Appendix III – The Authentic Texts from English 7

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1 Introduction

English teachers actively make decisions about what texts are appropriate for their students. For example, according to the Swedish National Agency for Education (Natl. Ag. F. Ed.) teachers are expected to take into account students’ different skills, needs and backgrounds when choosing a text (Natl. Ag. F. Ed. 2013, pp. 4-5).

Furthermore, the texts that teachers choose should develop the students’ worldview (Natl. Ag. F. Ed. 2013, p. 6), e.g. their understanding of society, democracy, cultures, etc. (Natl. Ag. F. Ed. 2011, p. 3). Lastly, teachers cannot forget that the texts should be influenced by the students’ interests and what they desire to read about (Natl. Ag.

F. Ed. 2011, p. 5).

To fulfil these criteria, teachers have at their disposal textbooks designed for specific levels, but teachers are also expected to work with authentic texts in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom, as students are required by the syllabus to read different fictional and non-fictional texts (Natl. Ag. F. Ed. 2011, p. 3) Authentic texts are texts that have not been written for educational purposes (Berardo 2006, p. 61).

Examples of authentic texts are novels, poems, short stories, news articles and blogs.

There exist a multitude of authentic texts, all with their own stories that reflect parts of society, culture, history, philosophy and much more while also being written for a whole range of different readers.

Teachers are expected to make active choices when selecting authentic texts to ensure these are adapted to the group’s and individual students’ needs while also satisfying the syllabus criteria. In addition to considerations associated with expanding the students’ societal and cultural horizons, teachers also need to ensure that the vocabulary of the authentic texts is at an optimal level in relation to the students’

developmental stage and the requirements of the syllabus. Ensuring that a text’s vocabulary is at the proper difficulty for students is paramount, because it is the decisive factor whether a student will be able to understand the text (Nation 2006, p.

61, Laufer & Ravenhorst-Kalovski 2010, p. 15). Selecting suitable texts can therefore be a highly complex task. At the same time, this is an area where teachers have considerable professional freedom to enact their teacher agency in order for students

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to receive suitable reading material. Since there are numerous ways to enact this agency, it is important to investigate the individual choices made by practicing teachers.

A previous study, which investigated the vocabulary profile of textbooks for English language teaching in Sweden, has shown that textbooks designed for English 7 of upper secondary school do not quite meet the vocabulary expectations set by language researchers and the CEFR (Larsson 2017, p. 5). Inclusion of authentic text at this level is therefore absolutely necessary to ensure that the students leave upper secondary school with a sufficient level of vocabulary knowledge, and it is hence of particular urgency to investigate the authentic texts that English teachers select for their English 7 course. Analysing the vocabulary profile of authentic texts selected by practicing teachers can shed light on the level of vocabulary difficulty English 7 students read.

1.1 Research Aim

The aim of this study is to investigate whether the vocabulary in authentic texts used by upper secondary English teachers for the English 7 course reaches the expectations set by the Swedish National Agency for Education and CEFR. This will be done by analysing the vocabulary of 26 authentic texts by using vocabulary profile web tools that assess the vocabulary difficulty of said texts. This study is guided by the following research questions:

• What are the vocabulary profiles of authentic texts used by English 7 teachers?

• To what extent do the vocabulary profiles of authentic texts follow the expected levels specified by the Swedish National Agency for Education?

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2 Theoretical Background

This section first introduces the contextual background for this study. In this section the National and European policy documents are presented to highlight the expectations on English teachers. Secondly, in section 2.2 communicative language teaching and the role of authentic texts are presented in relation to vocabulary acquisition. Lastly, section 2.3 presents second language acquisition and how vocabulary size is important for reading comprehension.

2.1 Contextual Background

2.1.1 The Swedish National Agency for Education

The Swedish National Agency for Education stipulates several policy documents that teachers are expected to abide by on a curriculum and syllabus level, there are some criteria that are of particular importance for this study.

According to the general guidelines of the curriculum, all teachers are expected to take into account students’ different skills, needs and backgrounds when teaching (Natl. Ag. F. Ed. 2013, pp. 4-5). Furthermore, the material that teachers choose should be meant to develop the students’ worldview (Natl. Ag. F. Ed. 2011 p. 6).

According to the curriculum, teachers are meant to achieve this by providing an education that will not only challenge each respective student but also be influenced by the students’ interests and what they desire to learn about (Natl. Ag. F. Ed. 2013, pp. 4-5).

According to the specific guidelines of the syllabus, all English courses are expected to be conducted as far as possible in English (Natl. Ag. F. Ed. 2011, p. 1). However, there is no explicit mention of vocabulary in the English 7 syllabus. This omission can be viewed as intentional as the Swedish Natl. Ag. F. Ed. does explicitly mention vocabulary for the English 5 syllabus: “How words and phrases in oral and written communications create structure and context by clarifying introduction, causal connection, time aspects, and conclusion” (Natl. Ag. F. Ed. 2011, p. 3) and

“Processing of their own and other’s [. . .] use of words and phrases [to] clarify casual connections and time aspects” (Natl. Ag. F. Ed. 2011, p. 4).

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Although the English 7 syllabus does not explicitly deal with vocabulary, it does so implicitly. In the knowledge requirements for English 7, it is stated that “students [should be able to] express themselves in ways that are varied. . .” (Natl. Ag. F. Ed.

2011, p. 12). For students to be able to pass this criterion, it is reasonable they would require a wide range of vocabulary to vary their formulations and avoid repetition.

2.1.2 Common European Framework of Reference for Languages

The CEFR is a European policy document aimed to provide a foundation for language qualifications that teachers, and others who work in that field, can use as a guideline to create an education that stimulates language development and assist in how students can be assessed in relation to six reference levels (Council of Europe 2018, p. 25). However, although the CEFR’s levels are widely accepted in the language community (Kurteš & Saville 2008, p. 2) the purpose of the CEFR is not meant to dictate how language teaching should be executed, nor how students should be evaluated, but rather to raise questions that can promote language teaching and learning (Council of Europe 2018, pp. 25-26).

The six reference levels describe stages that a language learner is likely to progress through when learning a language. These reference levels are divided into three broad categories: Basic user (A1 and A2), Independent user (B1 and B2) and Proficient user (C1 and C2). However, due to the reference levels representing broad bands of language proficiency, they are often subdivided into intermediate levels (e.g. A1.1 and A1.2) (Council of Europe 2018, p. 34).

The CEFR utilizes the reference levels to illustrate how language skills develop from A1 to C2. The language skills that the CEFR deals with can be broad, encompassing the overall development of language proficiency (See Table 1), or focused, highlighting how a specific language skill is developed, like for example vocabulary range (See Table 2). The CEFR attempts to illustrate the development of language skills by proposing a set of ‘Can do’-statements (Council of Europe 2018, p. 25). For a language user to achieve a certain level, they are expected to achieve most, if not all, of the ‘Can do’-statements to that level (Council of Europe 2018, p. 34).

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Table 1. Common Reference Levels (Council of Europe 2001, p. 24).

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2.1.3 The English Profile Programme

The English Profile is a global research programme spearheaded by Cambridge University Press and Cambridge English Language Assessment (English Profile, 2015a). The program’s aim is to describe the CEFR with an English language perspective and provide answers to what the CEFR means for English language learning, teaching and assessment (Harrison 2015, p.1). This is to ensure that the CEFR is appropriately adapted to the English language and reduce the ambiguity regarding what English users must accomplish to reach one of the six reference levels.

Because, as Harrison (2015, p. 3) elaborates, the CEFR’s ‘Can do’-statements can be difficult to interpret for specific languages and contexts.

The English Profile Programme (EPP) has mainly focused its efforts on researching how vocabulary, grammar and language functions develop throughout the CEFR levels. The EPP’s research within vocabulary and grammar has yielded two online resources, the English Vocabulary Profile (EVP) and the English Grammar Profile

Table 2. Common Reference Levels to Vocabulary Range. A white line within a column represents that level has been subdivided into intermediate levels (Council of Europe 2018, p. 132)

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(EGP), which are meant to show what English users typically master for each CEFR level (Harrison 2015, p. 8). The EVP shows words, phrases, idioms and collocations in relation to the CEFR levels (Harrison 2015, p. 8, English Profile 2015b) (See Table 3 for examples). The EGP describes when grammatical features begin to develop and are fully mastered (Harrison 2015, p. 8)

Table 3. Example of words at the different CEFR levels

2.1.4 CEFR levels in Sweden

The Swedish National Agency for Education structure all language education in what is called ‘steps’ to generalize and systematize foreign language teaching and learning.

Each of the steps has been formalized with consideration to the needs of the Swedish education system and the CEFR’s levels. The steps are defined the same across all foreign language courses. This is not only to ensure that language courses are of the same quality but also that the certificate obtained from Sweden is valuable in other European countries (Natl. Ag. F. Ed. n.d., p.1)

In Sweden, there are a total of 7 steps. This is more than the number of levels that the CEFR provides, and because of this Sweden uses the CEFR’s intermediate levels to define them: Step 1 is slightly above A1, and step 7 is drastically lower than C2. Table 4 shows the CEFR levels for each of the English courses in Sweden. The level that is particularly interesting for this study is B2.2 as it is the level that English 7 is geared towards (Natl. Ag. F. Ed. n.d., pp. 1-4)

A1 Bag, Get, Always, Again

A2 Insect, Explain, Almost, Horrible B1 Goalkeeper, Note, Regularly, Unwell B2 Disability, State, Conveniently, Impolite C1 Joint, Assert, Namely, Poorly

C2 Impatience, Caution, Wildly, Industrious

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Table 4. CEFR Levels for each English Course in Sweden (Natl. Ag. F. Ed. n.d. pp. 3-4)

English Course CEFR level

Year 6 A2.1

Year 9 B1.1

ENG 5 B1.2

ENG 6 B2.1

ENG 7 B2.2

2.1.5 Curricular documents and teacher agency

The curricular documents are complex guidelines constituted by a multitude of criteria that teachers are meant to respect and fulfil. These guidelines are written to allow teachers to exert judgment and control over their own work so students can get the most from their education (Natl. Ag. F. Ed. 2013 pp. 4-6). Teachers, therefore, have considerable professional freedom to enact their teacher agency in order for students to receive a satisfactory learning experience. Since there are numerous ways to enact this agency, and this study investigates the individual choices made by practicing teachers, it is important to define what teacher agency is and how the definition is reflected when teachers select authentic texts.

Agency on itself can be defined as an umbrella term that encompasses volition, intentionality, initiative, intrinsic motivation and autonomy (van Lier 2008, p. 171).

These different terms are always interpreted from a social perspective, as agency is exercised in the interaction between individuals (van Lier 2008, p. 164). Furthermore, agency is not thought of as an ability that people possess but rather something that is expressed through actions (Biesta et al. 2015, p. 626; van Lier 2008, p. 171).

Therefore, agency is a concept that emphasizes how those actions contribute to achieving a particular goal by affecting the activity on others and oneself (van Lier 2008, p. 175). Due to agency’s complexity, van Lier proposes three core features of agency that align with how several scholars classify the term as:

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1) Agency involves initiative or self-regulation by the learner (or group)

2) Agency is interdependent, that is, it mediates and is mediated by the sociocultural context

3) Agency includes an awareness of the responsibility for one’s own actions vis- à-vis the environment, including affected others (van Lier 2008, p. 172)

From this brief definition, teachers can be argued to enact their agency in two ways when selecting authentic texts. Firstly, when teachers select an authentic text, they exert agency when they evaluate the suitability of it. In this evaluation, the teacher hypothesizes the potential impact the text will have on their students and how it will influence their teaching. Secondly, because a teacher chooses to use a text, the text can be viewed as an extension of themselves. From this perspective, which takes into consideration that reading is a complex interaction between reader and text (Berardo 2008, p. 64), the teacher mediates a social interaction that does not only include themselves but also the student and indirectly the author through the text.

2.2 Communicative language teaching and the role of authentic texts

for vocabulary acquisition

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) refers to the teaching approach which emphasizes that language is learned through practice. It is the type of teaching where students are active recipients and producers of the language. This means that they use the language to read, listen, speak and write (Harmer 2015, p. 57). In many aspects, CLT advocates for creating a language environment that facilitates acquisition.

Language acquisition is when language is learned passively. It is reasoned by Krashen’s “input hypothesis” (Krashen 1986, p. 440) that acquisition occurs when a learner receives comprehensible input. There are several conditions that must be met for input to become comprehensible. One of those is the I + 1 condition which states that the input language should be slightly above the language learner’s understanding.

This higher-level language input will become part of the language user if they interact with it frequently enough (Harmer 2015, p. 42: Lundahl 2019, p. 118). However, for students to interact with the language to such an extent, it is important that they are

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motivated and desires to partake in language-activities. Consequently, motivation is an important aspect of CLT.

The role of authentic texts is to function as material that will not only offer comprehensible input, that stimulates language development, but also motivates students to read. Authentic texts’ potential to fulfil this function exists in its variety of content and language use (Berardo 2008, p. 65).

The content of authentic texts can be very diverse and can differ in many aspects such as subject area, formality and subjectivity. The diversity of content can interest different types of readers while also maintain motivation in the classroom as students are more interested in reading a variety of texts (Berardo 2008, pp. 62-64). Offering meaningful content that students desire to read is not only important because it makes the reading experience realistic as it reflects what the students would read in their everyday life (Berardo 2008, p. 62-63) but also due to L2 research has shown that reading where learners are motivated and focused on meaning leads to measurable vocabulary acquisition (Paribakht & Wesche 1997, p. 175).

The language of authentic texts is also highly varied in vocabulary, structure and grammatical correctness. These variations can be reflections of the writer’s style and language proficiency. This sort of variation can be both detrimental and advantageous for language learning. The detrimental part is that they “often contain difficult language, unneeded vocabulary items and complex language structures, which can often [not only] create problems for the [students but also for the] teacher too”

(Berardo 2008, p.65). Consequently, the difficulty of the texts can de-motivate the students and hinder acquisition as the language input is far beyond their competence (Berardo 2008, p. 65). Furthermore, it is reasonable to assume that the difficulty of the texts can also cause students to interpret unknown words incorrectly. This is because when students encounter new words, without any guidance, L2 researchers have reasoned that students often utilize the context of the text to infer its meaning (Paribakht & Wesche 1997, p. 175). The context can undoubtedly be influenced by the texts’ grammatical structures.

In comparison, the main advantage of variation in language use is that it reflects how language is practiced in real life (Berardo 2008, p.65). Although it is not perfect,

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focusing on how the content is conveyed through different means does allow students to become aware that there are multiple ways to express themselves (Harmer 2015, p.

58). Furthermore, because the Swedish National Agency for Education (2013, p. 5) strongly advocates for students to become critical readers, teaching students to be critical of the correctness of texts is motivated. This sort of approach can hypothetically combat the risk for students acquiring language errors they encounter.

These precautions will most likely not only stimulate implicit vocabulary acquisition as it occurs during general reading (Grabe & Stoller 1997, p. 119) but also increase it because the students are being told to direct their focus on those aspects (Paribakht &

Wesche 1997, pp. 176-177).

However, language variation does not necessarily only reflect the writer but also the text genre. Text genres are often constructed by different types of vocabulary. Some vocabulary may be central for a particular genre while being marginal for others. For example, common descriptive adjectives might be extensively used in fiction while seldomly used in news articles (Grabe & Stoller, 1997 p. 119). This means that different genres are more useful than others for specific vocabulary acquisition.

2.3 Vocabulary learning

2.3.1 Vocabulary Acquisition

According to second language research, vocabulary acquisition has shown to occur extensively when people read texts (Grabe & Stoller 1997, p. 119: Krashen 1986, pp.

441-443, Parikbakht & Wesche 1997, p. 175). Numerous studies have shown that language acquisition through only using receptive skills can “develop extremely high levels of language and literacy competence” (Krashen 1994, cited in Krashen 1998 p.

117).

However, incidental vocabulary acquisition is generally slow and unpredictable as there is no way to predict when acquisition occurs nor what words will be acquired and to what degree they will be understood (Parikbakht & Wesche 1997, p. 174).

Furthermore, studies have shown that readers need to at least encounter a word upwards to 10 times before it is incorporated into their vocabulary. Other studies have shown that EFL students often ignore unknown words unless reading comprehension

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questions specifically required that they be understood (Parikbakht & Wesche 1997, pp. 176-177).

Vocabulary acquisition can be enhanced by instructional interventions and thematic reading (Parikbakht & Wesche 1997, pp. 196-197). Instructional interventions refer to when the reader receives instructions that are beyond solely reading a text. For example, a form of instructional intervention would be if the reader is told to direct their focus toward particular vocabulary items or instructed to read a text accompanying a series of vocabulary exercises. Thematic reading means that the texts read are thematically related and contain vocabulary that is presented several times in different meaningful contexts.

2.3.2 Vocabulary size and reading comprehension

Reading comprehension refers to a person’s ability to understand what is read. For many language researchers, the process of reading and understanding a text is complex. There exist multiple different models, all highlighting different aspects in the reading process, that can be used to explain how a reader deciphers meaning from a text (Berardo 2006, p. 61; Lundahl 1998, pp. 15-22).

One aspect that is mentioned as being important for a reader to understand a text, is their ability to decipher individual words and their meanings (Lundahl 1998, p.22).

Being able to decipher most words in a text has shown by Nation (2006 p. 61) and Laufter and Ravenhorst-Kalvoski (2010, p. 15) to be the distinction between a text being incomprehensible and adequately comprehensible. According to Nation (2006 p. 61), adequately comprehensible texts are believed to be achievable when a reader has 95% text coverage (1 unknown word in 20). Although adequate comprehension is achievable it will require assistance, which can come from a teacher, a word list and/or a dictionary. Unassisted compression is believed to be achieved when a reader has 98% coverage (1 unknown word in 50) (Nation 2006, pp. 51, 61). Nevertheless, Nation (2006, p. 61) does state that even with 98% text coverage, a text does not necessarily become easy and will still require effort from the reader to comprehend the text fully.

However, the relation between reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge is more complex than that. This is because vocabulary can be categorized into different

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levels of difficulty. One approach to categorizing words is by analysing how common they are (Nation, 2001). Nation groups words together in accordance with their frequency: the first one thousand most frequent words (K-1), the second thousand most frequent words (K-2), and so on. The higher number of less frequent words a text has the more difficult it is.

Another approach to categorizing words is by grading them individually. This is an undertaking that the University of Cambridge has taken upon itself with its English Profile Programme (EPP). This programme was created in collaboration with the Council of Europe to grade each word in relation to one of the six CEFR levels (Text Inspector n.d.a). Similarly, as it was for the word frequency, the higher number of words belonging to higher CEFR levels a text has the more difficult it is.

However, it becomes apparent that classifying a text’s difficulty from how many of the words were graded by their frequency or CEFR level does not provide good insight into how difficult the text is. This is because the difficulty of a text’s vocabulary is proportionate to the reader’s language proficiency. For example, Lextutor (n.d.c) argues that if a reader only knows 1,000 word families they would be able to adequately understand a text that consists 95% of words from K-1. However, if 95% of the text’s words were from K-5 or K-6 then such a novice reader would have major difficulties comprehending that text. Similar reasoning can most likely be used when analysing a text’s vocabulary difficulty with the CEFR levels. A text that consists 95% of words from A1 would be appropriate for a reader with A1 reading proficiency.

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3 Methodology

This study investigates the vocabulary profiles of authentic texts used by practicing teachers of English 7. In order to answer the research questions, the study is based on data that have been retrieved from participants. This section describes the methodological underpinnings of the study and the procedural steps taken to retrieve and select a reasonable dataset and examine the selected data in a systematic manner.

3.1 Method & Material

3.1.1 Selecting Participants

The data collected for this study are authentic texts English 7 teachers use. Finding English teachers who teach English 7 courses was primarily done by initially asking fellow students and university teachers if they could recommend teachers who currently teach English 7 and who they believe would be interested in participating in the study (See Appendix I for contact E-mail). After acquiring information about a potential participant, a contact e-mail was sent to the teacher asking if they were interested in participating in the study (See Appendix II). Teachers who agreed to aid the study were asked to provide authentic texts they used in their teaching

3.1.2 Participants and Data

In total, five teachers, each from different schools, participated and provided 85 authentic texts for this study. These texts could be grouped into 6 genres: (i) novels, (ii) poems, (iii) short stories, (iv) news articles, (v) educational articles and websites and (vi) essays. Most teachers only sent texts related to novels, poems, short stories and news articles. However, it should be noted that not all teachers provided texts of these four genres. The full list of the authentic texts acquired during this study can be found in Appendix III.

3.1.3 Selection of Data

The 85 authentic texts obtained from the teachers were then reduced to a number that would be a reasonable dataset for this study. For this study, 2 texts from the following genres were assessed as reasonable when considering the time restrictions placed on this research paper: (i) novels, (ii) poems, (iii) short stories and (iv) news articles. The

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selection process for this study went through two steps. Step 1 was investigating if the text could be found online. This was to ensure that texts could be acquired and analysed directly into one of the vocabulary profile web tools. Step 2 was selecting two texts from each teacher for four different text genres: novels, poems, short stories and news articles. Selecting texts was done by assigning each text with a number and using a random number generator.

Of the 83 authentic texts obtained 26 texts were selected for this study. The texts selected for this study can be seen in Table 5. It should be noted that plenty of teachers used Coetzee's novel Disgrace (1999) and Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby (1992).

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Table 5. The selected authentic texts for this study

Teacher Category Text

1

Novel Uglies by Scott Westerfeld (2005)

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1998)

Poem None given

Short Story

The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin (1894) A Private Experience by Ngozi (2004) News Article

Christopher de Bellaigue, 2019, January 18. Death on demand: has euthanasia gone too far? The Guardian,

Sahra Zhang. 2020, May 24. We Don’t Even Have a COVID-19 Vaccine, and Yet the Conspiracies Are Here. The Atlantic.

2

Novel

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (2003) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (2016) Poem

‘The Raven’ by Allan Edgar Poe (1845)

‘The Road Not Taken' by Robert Frost (1916) Short Story

A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner (1961) The Yellow Wallpaper by Gilman (1892) News Article None given

Novel Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (1999)

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3

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waught (2011) Poem

‘Exposure’ by Wilfred Owen (1920) ‘Fragment’ by Rupert Brooke (1918) Short Story None given

News Article None given

4

Novel

Animal Farm by George Orwell (1980)

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (2016) Poem

‘When You Are Old’ by William Butler Yeats (1893) ‘The Naming of Cats’ by T.S. Eliot (1936)

Short Story

Hairball by Margaret Atwood (1990)

The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen by Graham Greene (1965)

News Article Stephanie Bunbury. 2016, January 12. The Danish Girl: an exploration of gender, sexuality and cultural expectations. The Sydney Morning Herald

Rory Carroll. 2017, June 23. Inspector gadget: how smart devices are outsmarting criminals. The Guardian.

5

Novel

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (1999)

The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (2016)

Poem ‘Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?’ by Shakespeare (1609) ‘41 shots’ by Bruce Springsteen (2003)

Short Story None given

News Article Margaret Carlson. 1991, June 24. Is This What Feminism Is All About?

1991. Time.

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3.1.4 Processing of Data

The selected authentic texts were either copied manually from a pdf-file to a Microsoft Word-document or converted by the Word-program itself. All texts were then modified by removing all dots, commas, quotation marks or any other symbol that is not a letter (See Table 5 for all symbols that were removed for this study). This is done as special symbols can result in words not being recognized by the vocabulary profile web tools.

Table 5. Symbols deleted for this study

Symbol . , ‘ “ ! ? - – — : ]

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ; [

After this procedure texts can be processed through Compleat Lexical Tutor (n.d.a), however, only texts shorter than 10,000 words are ready to be treated by Text Inspector (n.d.b). Longer texts require to be first processed through a word counter tool and then into Text Inspector. The word counter tool (Word Count Tool n.d) counts all the unique words in the document and produces a list that shows the frequency of words. This list is transferred to Microsoft Excel-sheet. The words are then transferred to Text Inspector. Text Inspector processes the words and assigns them a grade in relation to the CEFR; this data is downloaded to an Excel-file.

Utilizing the data from Word Count Tool and Text Inspector a text’s vocabulary profile is obtained. This complex procedure is done to decrease the time it takes for Text Inspector to process the texts.

3.1.5 Analysing the Data

The vocabulary profiles gained from Text Inspector (n.d.b) and Compleat Lexical Tutor (n.d.a) are then analysed. The analysis is based on Lextutor (n.d.b) argument that texts’ difficulty is proportionate to the reader’s language proficiency. For example, as was stated in section 2.4.2, if a reader only knows 1,000-word families

Olivia Waxman. 2016, May 23. How Thelma & Louise Captured a Moment in the History of American Feminism. Time.

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they would be able to adequately understand a text that consists 95% of words from K-1. However, if 95% of the text’s words were from K-5 or K-6 then such a novice reader would have major difficulties comprehending that text. Similar reasoning is used when analysing a text’s vocabulary difficulty with the CEFR levels. For example, a text that consists 95% of words from A1 would be appropriate for a reader with A1 reading proficiency

For this study, investigating where the 95% and 98% thresholds occur is of importance as it is these parameters that determine when a reader can adequately comprehend a text (Nation 2006, p. 61, Laufter & Ravenhorst-Kalvoski 2010, p. 15).

From the theoretical section, it is expected that these thresholds are reached at a level appropriate for English 7 students. According to the Swedish National Agency for Education, English 7 students should have an English language proficiency of B2.2.

Therefore, vocabulary profiles graded by CEFR level should reach the thresholds at B2.2. However, because Text Inspector only grades vocabulary into the broad six- reference levels (A1 to C2) and not the intermediate ones (e.g. A1.1 and A1.2) then the threshold should be reached in the middle of B2. For vocabulary profiles graded by word frequency there exist no guidelines or academic study that can be used to state that a B2.2 language user should know the corresponding number of word families. Hence, this study requires a baseline that reflects English reading-material that English 7 students should be able to read. Larsson’s (2017, p. 31) baseline based on a small corpus of articles from The Guardian is used as a reference point for comparison of texts included in this study.

3.1.6 Ethical Considerations

Ethical considerations for this study pertain to contacting participants and using authentic texts found online. The ethical considerations needed when contacting teachers are they must be informed of what the study is about, that their personal information will be treated confidentially, that their participation is voluntary, they have the right to withdraw their participation at any point and the material which is gathered for this study will not be used for any other purpose than what they are informed of. The ethical considerations required when handling authentic texts are that they are used for non-profit research and the material is not shared with others.

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4 Results and Analysis

In this section, the results from the vocabulary profiles processed through Text Inspector (n.d.a) and Compleat Lexical Tutor (n.d.a) are presented. Under sections 4.1 Word Frequency and 4.2 CEFR levels each teacher’s vocabulary profile is described and explained followed up with a figure showing the vocabulary difficulty of their texts within the four genres: novels, poems, short stories and news articles.

These figures show how the texts’ vocabulary is graded by their frequency or CEFR level. They do, however, not show the number of words that the program could not classify. This is done to illustrate where the thresholds of 95% and 98% are reached.

These thresholds are therefore the same as the percentages shown in the figures.

Hence, the important part of the figures is what difficulty is reached at 95% and 98%.

Depending on if the data is showing word frequency or CEFR level what is expected to be reached within these parameters differs. For word frequency it is that the teachers’ texts are graded similar to the baseline, meaning that the 95% and 98%

threshold are reached at a similar difficulty. For CEFR levels the expectations are that 95% and 98% is reached within B2.2 which for this study is defined as slightly above B2. Furthermore, it should be noted that the figures between the teachers differ as some teachers did not provide texts for certain text genres. Lastly, after each teacher’s text has been examined an overall summary is given with an accompanying figure.

4.1 Word Frequency

This section presents the vocabulary profiles of the teachers’ authentic texts in relation to word frequency. Figure 1 below shows the vocabulary difficulty of Teacher 1’s texts. As indicated by the figure, Teacher 1 contributed material consisting of novels, short stories and news articles. Furthermore, as the figure shows the teacher’s novels and short stories reach 95% at K4 similarly as the baseline. The News articles, however, reach the 95% threshold at K6-25. This means that the articles consist of more infrequent words than the baseline. All the texts reach the 98% threshold at K6- 25. This overall means that the Teacher 1 novels and short stories have a vocabulary difficulty suitable for English 7 students while this teacher’s news articles might be too difficult for students with this proficiency.

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Figure 1. Word Frequency of Teacher 1’s authentic texts

Continuing to the next teacher, Figure 2 shows the vocabulary difficulty of Teacher 2’s texts. As indicated by the figure, teacher 2 provided texts consisting of novels, short stories and poems. Furthermore, as can be seen from the figure, the short stories of teacher 2 align with the baseline, reaching the 95% threshold at K4. The novels and poems of teacher 2 deviate from the baseline reaching 95% at K5 and K6-25 respectively. The poems deviate drastically from the baseline in this regard, as the K6-25 is already reached at 89%. Overall, the vocabulary difficulty of teacher 2’s novels and short stories is of a suitable level for English 7 students even though the novels reach 95% at K5. This can be reasoned because the baseline reaches the 95%

threshold just in between K4 and K5. However, the poems are probably far too difficult for most English 7 students, reaching the K6-25 at already 89%.

Continuing to the next teacher, Figure 3 shows the vocabulary difficulty of Teacher 3’s texts. As indicated by the figure, teacher 3 contributed with texts consisting of novels and short stories. The figure shows that the teacher’s texts deviate from the baseline. It is clear from the figure that the novels are just on the verge of K4 at the 95% threshold while the baseline at this point is in between K4 and K5. The short

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stories on the other hand reach 95% at K6-25. Both the teacher’s texts reach K6-25 at the 98% threshold similarly as the baseline does. Overall, the vocabulary suitability of the novels and short stories for English 7 students is that they potentially are either too easy or difficult for them.

Continuing to the next teacher, Figure 4 shows the vocabulary difficulty of Teacher 4’s texts. As indicated by the figure, teacher 4 contributed with texts for novels, short stories, news articles and poems. Furthermore, as the figure shows, the teacher’s texts in regard to novels, short stories and news articles are very similar to the baseline reaching 95% at K4 and 98% at K6-25. However, the teacher’s poems reach 95% at K3 and barely reach K6-K25 at 98% threshold. Overall, the teacher’s texts are suitable for English 7 students. However, the teacher’s poems do lack vocabulary difficulty that would challenge most students at this proficiency.

Continuing to the next teacher, Figure 5 shows the vocabulary difficulty of Teacher 5. As indicated by the figure, teacher 5 contributed with texts consisting of novels, short stories and news articles. As the figures show, the teacher’s texts deviate from the baseline. The teacher’s novels and news articles reach 95% at K4 similarly as the

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baseline does. The teacher’s short stories reach 95% at K2 and deviate greatly from the baseline. Furthermore, the novels and news articles reach 98% at K6-25 similarly as the baseline does. However, the short stories reach the 98% threshold at K5.

Overall, the vocabulary difficulty of teacher 5’s texts is on the lower end of the spectrum. Although the novels and news articles are slightly lower than the baseline it is debatable whether they are too easy for English 7 students, it is however clear that the short stories do not contain vocabulary suitable for this level.

This concludes the individual teacher’s vocabulary profiles concerning word frequency. Overall, the vocabulary difficulty of the teachers’ texts differs in between text genres and deviates from the baseline at the 95% threshold, while being similar at the 98% thresholds (See Table 6). As indicated by Table 6, teacher 1, 2 and 4 had at least one text genre which aligned or differed from the baseline. The texts that deviated from the baseline for teachers 1 and 2 reached the 95% threshold higher than K4. In comparison teacher 4’s texts that deviated from the baseline reached the 95%

threshold lower than K4. In comparison, teacher 3 and 5 that had no text genre that aligned with the baseline. Teacher 3’s texts differed greatly from one another, reaching the 95% threshold either higher or lower than K4. Teacher 5’s texts differed slightly from the baseline reaching 95% at the low end of K4. Lastly, there are only two instances where the 98% threshold differs from the baseline which is the poems from Teacher 4 and the short stories from Teacher 5. Both instances are where the K6-25 has either been barely reached or not at all. To conclude, the vocabulary difficulty of the teachers’ texts is often slightly too simple or advanced for the average English 7 students.

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Table 6. Teachers’ text similarity and deviation from the baseline. . Texts that deviate from the baseline are shown in the table. If only one deviation is written in the table, it means the other one was similar to the baseline. Texts that teachers did not contribute with have a line drawn in the cell.

Teacher Novels Short Stories News Articles Poems Baseline

1 Similar to the Basline

Similar to the Basline

95% at K6-25 -

95% at K4 98% at K6-25 2 95% at K5 Similar to the

Basline

- 95% at K6-25

3 95% at the low end of K4

95% at K6-25 - -

4 Similar to the Basline

Similar to the Basline

95% at K3 98% at the low end of K6-25 5 95% at the low

end of K4

95% at the low end of K4 98% at K5

95% at the low end of K4

-

4.2 CEFR Levels

This section presents the vocabulary profiles of the teacher’s authentic texts in relation to the CEFR levels. Figure 6 below shows the vocabulary difficulty of Teacher 1’s texts. As indicated by the figure, teacher 1 contributed with text consisting of novels, short stories and articles. Furthermore, as the figure shows the teacher’s novels and short stories reach the 95% threshold at C1, while the teacher’s news articles reach it at C2. All of the teacher’s text reached 98% at C2

Continuing to the next teacher, Figure 7 shows the vocabulary difficulty of Teacher 2. As indicated by the figure, teacher 2 contributed with texts consisting of novels,

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short stories and poems. The 95% threshold is reached at C1 for the teacher’s poems and short stories while the teacher’s novels reach it at B2. Furthermore, the 98%

threshold is reached at C2 for the teacher’s poems and short stories while novels reach C1.

Continuing to the next teacher, Figure 8 shows the vocabulary difficulty of Teacher 3. As indicated by the figure, teacher 3 contributed with text consisting of novels and poems. Both of the teacher 3’s texts reach 95% at C1 and 98% at C2.

Continuing to the next teacher, Figure 9 shows the vocabulary difficulty of Teacher 5. As indicated by the figure, teacher 4 contributed with text consisting of novels, short stories, poems and news articles. The teacher’s short stories, poems and news articles reach the 95% threshold at C1 and 98% at C2. The teacher’s novels reach 95% at B2 and 98% at C1.

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Continuing to the next teacher, Figure 10 shows the vocabulary difficulty of Teacher 5. As indicated by the figure, teacher 5 contributed with text consisting of novels, poems and news articles. Teacher 5’s text fluctuates greatly between different text genres. The teacher’s novels reach both the thresholds of 95% and 98% at C1. The teacher’s poems reach the thresholds of 95% and 98% at B2. The teacher’s news articles reach the threshold of 95% at C1 while 98% at C2.

This concludes the individual teacher’s vocabulary profiles concerning word frequency. Overall, the vocabulary difficulty of the teachers’ texts was similar however they deviated greatly from the confines of B2.2. As it can be seen in Table 7, most teachers’ texts reached the 95% threshold at C1 and 98% threshold at C2.

This means that most of the texts require a higher reading proficiency than B2.2 to comprehend. Only the novels from teacher 2 and the poems from teacher 5 can be evaluated as being suitable for B2.2 students.

Table 7. The CEFR level reached at 95% and 98% of the teachers’ texts. Text genres that teachers did not contribute with have a line drawn in the cell.

Teacher Novels Short Stories News Articles Poems

1 95% at C1

98% at C2

95% at C1 98% at C2

95% at C2 98% at C2

-

2 95% at B2 95% at C1 - 95% at C1

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98% at C1 98% at C2 98% at C2

3 95% at C1

98% at C2

95% at C1 98% at C2

- -

4 95% at B2

98% at C1

95% at C1 98% at C2

5 95% at C1

98% at C1

95% at B2 98% at B2

95% at C1 98% at C2

-

5 Discussion.

5.1 Discussion of Results

The aim of this study was to investigate whether the vocabulary in authentic texts used by upper secondary English teachers for the English 7 course reaches the expectation set by the Swedish National Agency for Education and the CEFR. The study was guided by the following research questions: “What are the vocabulary profiles of authentic texts used by English 7 teachers?” and “To what extent do the vocabulary profiles of authentic texts follow the expected levels specified by the Swedish National Agency for Education?

The results of this study were conflicting. The analysis of the word frequency indicated that the texts were either slightly too simple or difficult for English 7 students, since the vocabulary profiles of the teachers’ texts deviated from the baseline based on Larsson’s (2017 p. 35) corpus of articles from The Guardian. In comparison, the analysis of the CEFR levels showed that texts were more suitable for students with an English proficiency of C1 to C2 rather than B2.2, as the 95%

threshold was often reached at C1 and the 98% threshold at C2. This means that the analysis of the CEFR levels indicated that the vocabulary difficulty was generally too advanced for English 7 students.

The conflicting conclusions can be due to that the baseline based on Larsson’s (2007 p. 35) small corpus of articles from The Guardian consists of vocabulary too advanced for English 7 students. This is a reasonable assessment considering that CEFR results

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showed that that 95% and 98% were mostly reached at C1 and C2 respectively.

Although these results from the CEFR analysis are limited by the amount of words Text Inspector have classified with a CEFR level, these are the results that was obtained in the study. Therefore, although this conclusion contradicts Larsson’s (2017) assessment of the Guardian articles, when considering that English 7 students have an English proficiency of B2.2 according to the Swedish National Agency for Education, the vocabulary of the teachers’ authentic texts is in most cases too advanced for English 7 students.

Although this study did not investigate the teachers’ reasons why they used these texts, the results can still reflect how the teachers have enacted their agency. The discussion of the results indicates that the vocabulary of the teachers’ authentic texts was too advanced for English 7 students when considering that they should have an English proficiency of B2.2. However, it is a fact that these texts are used by practicing English 7 teachers, meaning that the teachers must have evaluated that these texts are suitable for their students. This leads to the conclusion when teachers enact their agency, they choose texts containing vocabulary that the CEFR would deem too difficult.

Furthermore, teacher agency can potentially also be the reason why the teachers’

different text genres differed in vocabulary difficulty. This is because the teachers are selecting texts that take into consideration that students have different language proficiencies. This means that different texts can be too simple or advanced for some students while being suitable for others, meaning that the teacher is intentionally or unintentionally taking into consideration of Krashen’s I + 1 condition for comprehensible input.

5.2 Discussion of Methods

The selection procedure for this was convenience-based. This study made no effort to sample participants from a large population with methods that would ensure every member of the population had a chance of being selected. Furthermore, the material selected for this study were few and was chosen by using a random number generator.

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The reliability and validity of the instruments used for this study differs. Firstly, reliability refers to how replicable a study is (Winter 2000 p.2-3). The study’s instruments should yield high reliability as the vocabulary profile, Compleat Lexical Tutor (n.d.a) and Text Inspector’s EPP (n.d.a), are quantitative tools that utilize large corpora to analyse texts. Secondly, the validity refers to how accurate the study is in measuring what is supposed to measure (Winter 2000 p. 2). The aim of this study was to investigate whether the vocabulary in authentic texts used by English 7 teachers reaches the expectations set by the Swedish National Agency for Education and CEFR. This was done by analysing the vocabulary profiles of those texts with powerful vocabulary profile web tools that have been constructed in collaboration with language researchers and Council of Europe. However, the validity of Text Inspector’s EPP tool is decreased due to its limitation.

The validity of the Text Inspector’s EPP is limited by how many words have been graded with a CEFR level. From the 26 texts analysed with Text Inspector about 20%

of the vocabulary was classified as unlisted. Inspecting the words that could not be classified with a CEFR level it was notable that a small portion of these words is proper names,possessive apostrophe, numbers and other special symbols, while the majority of words could have been graded between B1 to C2: Abruptly, Activated, Adders, Aggravating, Alkaline, Amber, Anti and Ash, etc. It should be made clear that 20% can have drastic effects on the actual difficulty of a text, and this is an aspect of the data that could not be explored by the means of the selected analytic tools. This limiting factor is to some extent combated by removing special symbols and numbers from the texts. Nevertheless, this limitation does decrease the validity of the EPP tool.

Furthermore, the validity of the study limited by several factors. Firstly, the corpus size of each teacher’s text genre is rather small as only two texts were selected for each genre. Secondly, the list of texts obtained by the participants may have been affected by the way in which they want their teaching to come across. Although the authentic texts might have been influenced by the participants’ desire to be perceived in a certain way, nevertheless they are texts that professional teachers use. Lastly, the study has no information about the teachers’ reasoning when selecting.

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5.3 Implications for the teacher practice and areas for further research

The implications of this study for the teacher practice is English 7 teachers select authentic texts of similar vocabulary difficulty and that English 7 students read authentic texts that contain advanced vocabulary that goes beyond the expectations of the CEFR. How far these reading-materials’ vocabulary exceed the guidelines of the CEFR requires further research. Although the English 7 teachers assess reading- material with vocabulary that exceeds the CEFR requirements as suitable for their students, teachers should take into consideration that incidental vocabulary acquisition is generally slow and unpredictable thus instructional interventions and thematic reading are suggested for their reading-material to lead to effective vocabulary acquisition. Furthermore, it could also be advantageous to investigate how the CEFR should be specifically interpreted in different contexts. For example, how the CEFR relates specifically to word frequency so free tools such as Compleat Lexical Tutor (n.d.a) becomes more useful and how the CEFR can become a more effective tool for English teaching in Sweden similarly as the EPP does but for the English language in general. It could be reasoned that vocabulary profile web tools, like Compleat Lexical Tutor (n.d.a) and Text Inspector’s EPP (n.d.a), could become useful for teachers to make informed choices of authentic texts. However, providing these sorts of tools to the teachers will require that they receive specific guidelines on how to analyse the data from these tools. Lastly, further research should include a closer engagement with the teachers and obtain their views on how and why they select particular authentic texts.

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Appendix I – Contacting E-mail to Fellow students and

University Teachers

Hej,

I mitt examensarbete i engelska undersöker jag lärares användning av texter utöver kursboken i Engelska 7. Jag undrar nu om du skulle ha möjlighet att bidra till min studie genom att TIPSA mig om lärare som undervisar i Engelska 7 och som du tror skulle vara intresserade av att delta i min studie.

Som informant i studien är din medverkan självklart helt frivillig, och du har möjlighet att avbryta din medverkan närsomhelst under studien.

Med vänliga hälsningar, Jonathan Ståhlberg

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Appendix II – Contacting E-mail to Participants

Hej,

I mitt examensarbete i engelska undersöker jag lärares användning av texter utöver kursboken i Engelska 7. Jag undrar nu om du skulle ha möjlighet att bidra till min studie genom att ge mig en lista på texter som du använder eller tycker det är lämpligt att använda för dina elever i Engelska 7, det kan vara romaner, noveller, artiklar etc.

I min undersökning kommer jag att fokusera på texterna, som jag kommer att analysera med hjälp av digitala verktyg.

Som informant i studien är din medverkan självklart helt frivillig, och du har möjlighet att avbryta din medverkan närsomhelst under studien. Dina personuppgifter behandlas konfidentiellt, och materialet som sammanställs för studien kommer inte att användas för något annat syfte än det som beskrivits här.

Med vänliga hälsningar, Jonathan Ståhlberg

Vocabulary Profiles of Authentic Texts used by Upper Secondary English teachers