Harry Potter and the Prisoners of Vocabulary Instruction: Acquiring Academic Language at Hogwarts

Repository record updated on:

Oct. 20, 2020, 1:01 p.m.

Database record updated on:

Nov. 27, 2020, 8:48 p.m.

Last Harvested on:

Nov. 27, 2020, 8:48 p.m.

bitstream:

http://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/10125/67377/1/32_2_10125_67377.pdf

bitstream_txt:

http://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/10125/67377/2/32_2_10125_67377.pdf.txt

collection:

Volume 32, No. 2

contributor.author:

McQuillan, Jeff

date.accessioned:

2020-10-19T19:21:14Z

date.available:

2020-10-19T19:21:14Z

date.issued:

2020-10-15

description.abstract:

Several researchers have claimed that low-achieving students, especially second language students, need explicit academic vocabulary instruction to “catch up” with their age peers (e.g., Nagy & Townsend, 2012). Two possible paths to vocabulary growth – free reading and explicit vocabulary instruction – were compared in terms of their efficiency (Mason, 2007) in words acquired per minute by analyzing data from a large corpus (1.1 million words) of young-adult novels taken from the Harry Potter series (Rowling, 2016), and from seven large-scale academic vocabulary intervention studies. The Harry Potter novels contain 85% of all the words on the Academic Word List (AWL), which is thought to include the most important word families needed for success in school. Reading all seven Harry Potter novels is predicted to result in the acquisition of between one-fifth and one-half of these AWL words. This vocabulary gain is 1.6 to four times more efficient than what has been achieved so far through explicit instruction.

description.provenance:

Made available in DSpace on 2020-10-19T19:21:14Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 32_2_10125_67377.pdf: 399916 bytes, checksum: 4ff88782a8dcb6584036533aaf17ce3d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2020-10-15

endingpage:

142

identifier.citation:

McQuillan, J. (2020). Harry Potter and the Prisoners of Vocabulary Instruction: Acquiring Academic Language at Hogwarts. Reading in a Foreign Language, 32(2), 122-142. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/67377

identifier.issn:

1539-0578

identifier.uri:

http://hdl.handle.net/10125/67377

number:

2

publisher:

University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center Center for Language & Technology

site_url:

/rfl/item/445

startingpage:

122

subject:

vocabulary acquisition, academic language, pleasure reading, efficiency, explicit instruction

title:

Harry Potter and the Prisoners of Vocabulary Instruction: Acquiring Academic Language at Hogwarts

type:

Article

type.dcmi:

Text

volume:

32