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

dc.contributor.author McQuillan, Jeff
dc.date.accessioned 2020-10-19T19:21:14Z
dc.date.available 2020-10-19T19:21:14Z
dc.date.issued 2020-10-15
dc.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.
dc.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
dc.identifier.issn 1539-0578
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/10125/67377
dc.publisher University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center
dc.publisher Center for Language & Technology
dc.subject vocabulary acquisition, academic language, pleasure reading, efficiency, explicit instruction
dc.title Harry Potter and the Prisoners of Vocabulary Instruction: Acquiring Academic Language at Hogwarts
dc.type Article
dc.type.dcmi Text
prism.endingpage 142
prism.number 2
prism.startingpage 122
prism.volume 32
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