Innovation in Language Learning

Presenter will share adaptable materials and approaches for implementing PVO (Personal Vocabulary Organizing) with college students. Using the Academic Word List [1], the presenter introduces a novel application of the PVO that augments EFL learner schema activation to improve reading comprehension and subsequent academic writing. Presenter will open the session with a short overview of the pedagogy for implementing and utilizing PVO in the EFL classroom as a learning tool and strategy for students. Next, we will explore the crucial idea that expanding a learner’s mental lexicon [5] is just one facet of L2 vocabulary acquisition as learning new vocabulary and being able to categorize it for retention is an essential part of becoming fluent in English. English contains approximately 500,000 words with word families numbering 54,000 [2]. College educated native speakers regularly use 16,000 - 20,000 word families [3]. Without a strong collection of vocabulary words, ELLs will find themselves searching for words when speaking, have more difficulty understanding others, be slower at reading, and have much weaker writing. Students need to continue to build on their vocabulary in order to both express themselves accurately and to succeed in their academic studies. From there an explanation of how the PVO can be best utilized by EFL/ESL students. Appropriating Averil Coxhead’s AWL (Academic Word List), the PVO links categorization [4] with the systematic collection of vocabulary from that list [1], required classroom textbooks, and assigned readings to improve reading comprehension, and writing ability and knowledge gained during the course relative to the instructor’s syllabus. In the end, attendees will see that the iterative process of vocabulary acquisition has the potential to not only increase a learner’s level of reading comprehension and the quality of their academic writing but their listening comprehension and oral presentation skills as well. Using exit interviews, presenter has found that PVO has proven invaluable in aiding students who overwhelmingly wish to continue working with PVO. Finally, the presenter will share classroom materials and provide both lesson plans and a demonstration for implementation of the PVO system.