國中階段的學術詞彙與詞彙知識

Abstract

學術詞彙是學生在學術場域用以理解、思辯，以及與他人交流的重要工具。本研究透過文獻回顧指出學術詞彙的意義、特性，與評量方法，進一步探討我國國中教科書出現了哪些學術詞彙，以及國中學生相較於專家對學術詞彙的掌握程度。本研究採用現行國中各版本之教科書作為語料來源，其中包含數學、理化、生物、地科、歷史、地理、公民等七科，合計54本課本，共597個單元。運用「庫博中文語料庫分析工具」將語料進行斷詞處理與產生詞頻表，再經由出現的單元數（詞頻）、領域廣度、均勻度等指標進行篩選，產生了762個詞彙的「國中學術詞彙表」，其中與英文學術詞彙有諸多雷同。然而，刪詞的過程發現，中文詞彙的詞性無法藉由形構上的變化表現出來，也因斷詞緣故，有虛詞附著在實詞上的現象。接著，本研究選擇國中課本語料中含有國中學術詞彙之適當段落作為題幹，並將該學術詞彙挖空，編製成四選一選擇題式克漏詞測驗，共108題。透過中學教師或擁有碩博士學歷的37名專家進行預試後，篩選出60題作為正式施測之「國中學術詞彙能力測驗」。正式施測對象為臺灣五個縣市的五所國中共255位九年級學生，其中男生122名，女生133名，將施測結果與專家做對照，並進行試題分析後，有以下的研究發現：一、國中學術詞彙能力測驗具有良好的信效度；二、專家的學術詞彙能力顯著高於學生；三、國中女生的學術詞彙能力顯著高於男生；四、學術詞彙在不同的學科中具同質性，且難度相同；五、脈絡層次的掌握程度為造成專家與學生表現落差大的關鍵；六、學術辭彙之詞義在不同的學習階段可能產生轉化。最後，以上研究結果可提供教學現場之教師在一般教學、補救教學、教材或試題編製上作為參考。

Academic vocabulary is an important tool used by students for comprehension, critical thinking, and communication in the academic field. The research reveals the purpose, characteristics, and evaluation method of academic vocabulary, further probes into the academic vocabulary used in Taiwan’s junior high textbooks, and assesses the degree of students’ mastery of academic vocabulary in comparison with that of the professionals.The research adopted various editions of textbooks currently used in junior high schools as the source of corpus, among which included the seven subjects of math, physics and chemistry, biology, earth science, history, geography, and civics, amounting to 54 books and 597 chapters. The corpus was tokenized through CORPRO to produce a word frequency list, then words in the list were filtered through criteria such as chapter count (frequency), range, dispersion, etc., producing a list of 762 Chinese words designated as “The Junior High School Academic Vocabulary List.” There is a high level of similarity between the resulting list and equivalent English academic vocabulary lists. However, in the course of developing the list, it was found that unlike the English language, the part of speech of each Chinese word cannot be identified through word arrangement and spacing , and thus the tokenization process often produced results where a content word followed by a function word was identified as one vocabulary word.Next, a cloze test of 108 multiple-choice questions was developed by selecting sections of text containing academic vocabulary from the corpus. The academic vocabulary was removed from the text to form the test questions and the academic vocabulary was provided as one of the four options in a multiple-choice question. The test was then administered to 37 professionals as a pretest. A professional in this research was defined as someone who is a school teacher or someone holding a master’s or doctoral degree. Based on the pretest results, 60 questions were selected and compiled as a formal test designated as “The Junior High School Academic Vocabulary Test.” Said test was then administered to 255 ninth graders, 122 male and 133 female, from five junior high schools located in five different cities in Taiwan. The test results were compared with those of the professionals. The analysis revealed the following: 1. The Junior High School Academic Vocabulary Test has a good level of reliability and validity; 2. the professionals display higher levels of mastery of academic vocabulary compared to the students; 3. among the junior high school students, females displayed higher levels of mastery of academic vocabulary compared to males; 4. academic vocabulary is homogeneous across subjects and shows an equivalent level of complexity; 5. the key cause of the gap in mastery of academic vocabulary between the experts and the students lies in how well one deals with the different levels of context within a body of text; and 6. the meaning of academic vocabulary may evolve at different stages of learning. The research results can serve as a reference for teachers in regular teaching, remedial teaching, and material or test development.