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A corpus-based investigation of Swedish upper secondary school students’ vocabulary

The aim of this investigation was to contribute with more knowledge concerning the learning and teaching of English vocabulary in Swedish upper secondary school in Sundsvall by answering the following research questions: Which CEFR level does each group’s vocabulary meet after29excluding K1 and K2 words? How accurate is the vocabulary production of the two groups in relation to each CEFR level? I also hypothesized that the group of students attending the Natural Science programme would be more proficient than the group attending the Economics programme since the former had studied the course English 5 longer and attend a more theoretical and advanced programme than the latter. Therefore, I gathered 30 essays from students attending the Natural Science programme at one school and 30 essays from students attending the Economics programme at another school to be analysed and compared. To analyse the material, I utilized Walker and Allan’s (2018) method which allows one to analyse vocabulary usage in relation to frequency levels and CEFR levels. The results demonstrated that the Natural Science group was more proficient than the Economics group, which also supported my hypothesis; however, there was variation in proficiency between students within both of the groups. The results had several implications for future teaching and learning of vocabulary in Swedish upper secondary school and these were primarily concerned with different ways of teaching weaker and stronger students mid-frequency and low-frequency vocabulary. In the future, it would be interesting to investigate how high-achieving students are taught mid-frequency and low-frequency vocabulary. / <p>Godkännande datum 2020-01-19</p>

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:miun-38943
Date January 2020
CreatorsHolmberg Sjöling, Christian
PublisherMittuniversitetet, Institutionen för humaniora och samhällsvetenskap
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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