Browsing by Author "Pinchbeck, Geoffrey George"

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    The measurement of c-fos mRNA stability
    (1999) Pinchbeck, Geoffrey George; Johnston, Randal N.
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    Vocabulary Use in Academic-Track High-School English Literature Diploma Exam Essay Writing and its Relationship to Academic Achievement
    (2017) Pinchbeck, Geoffrey George; Ricento, Thomas; Koh, Kim; Naqvi, Rahat; O'Brien, Mary G.; Harklau, Linda
    This dissertation will examine the relationship between written vocabulary use and academic achievement in academic-track Canadian high-school students. With a shift away from labour based sectors and rapid demographic shifts in large urban centres, there has been a call for academic language to be further operationalized and be given a more prominent role in mainstream public educational planning across the curricula in Canada and the U.S. Although this call for research was inspired initially from studies on language-minority children, it is clear that the register of academic English is difficult for all students: monolingual English speakers, bilinguals, and multilinguals alike. A >1,000,000-word corpus and associated student data (n=1508) from a representative sample of government-administered academic-track grade 12 English Language Arts (ELA) final exam essays were used to examine the relationships between lexical sophistication (LS) and several indices of diversity (LD: MTLD, HD-D, Maas, tokens, types, families) with three types of academic achievement: 1) Essay Score, 2) ELA and Social Studies mean score, and 3) Math Score. Academic achievement was regressed on 1) LS, 2) LD, and 3) ESL funding history status. LS explained 30% of both ELA-Social Studies Score and Essay Score, whereas LD indices were associated with Essay Score only. Early-arriving immigrant ESL status was not a significant factor in any model. Mid-frequency word families were significantly more frequent in a high-achieving student sub-corpus as compared to a sub-corpus of low-achieving students. High-achieving student writing was also significantly more similar to academic written register corpora than spoken register corpora as compared to that of low-achieving students. I present how this research might be used to further operationalize academic language, to develop tools to monitor English academic literacy development for diagnostic purposes, and to inform a strategic mastery learning K-12 academic language pedagogy that includes lexical syllabus design for content classes.