In The Name of Allah

حمن �ه الّر� بسم الّلحیم الّر�

Special English For Computer Science StudentsBy: Sayed Mohammad Mehdi Feiz

3

Learning Vocabulary

Agenda

Academic Degrees

Parts of Speech

Word Frequency Lists

Using a or an

4

Certificate

Diploma

Associate Degree

Bachelor Degree

Master Degree

Doctorate Degree

Academic Degrees

There are eight parts of speech. A word’s part of speech is based on how the word is used in a sentence. Words can, therefore, be more than one part of speech.• nouns: (n.) name a person, place, or thing

Examples: Ms. Lopez, New Orleans, lamp.• pronouns: (pron.) take the place of a noun

Examples: I, me, you, she, he, it, her, we, they, my, which, that, anybody, everybody

• adjectives: (adj.) modify (describe or explain) a noun or pronoun

Examples: pretty, old, two, expensive, red, small• verbs: (v.) express an action or state of being

Examples: enjoy, run, think, read, am, is, are, was, were

Parts of Speech

• adverbs: (adv.) modify a verb, an adjective, or another adverbExamples: very, shortly, first, too, soon, quickly, finally, furthermore, however

• prepositions: (prep.) are placed before a noun or pronoun to create a phrase that relates to other parts of the sentence

Examples: after, around, at, before, by, from, in, into, of, off, on, through, to, up, with

• conjunctions: (conj.) join words or other sentence elements and show a relationship between the connected items

Examples: and, but, or, nor, for, so, yet, after, although, because, if, since, than, when

• interjections: (interj.) show surprise or emotionExamples: oh, hey, wow, ah, ouch

Parts of Speech (continue)

7

• Some ICT terms are difficult, but others are universally accepted. You probably know terms like modem, online, chat, email, website, virus and hacker; they are part of our everyday life.

• When you meet an unknown word, first try to guess the meaning from the context the surrounding words and the situation.

• Second, use bilingual or monolingual dictionary

Learning vocabulary: tips and techniques

8

Using a dictionaryLearning vocabulary: tips and techniques

9

• General Service List (GSL) 2,284 most common head words in English (i.e. “be” includes “am”, “is”, “are”, etc.)• Academic Word List (AWL) 570 words, ten sublists, excludes the GSL

Word Frequency Lists

10

• The General Service List (GSL) is a list of roughly 2000 words published by Michael West in 1953. The words were selected to represent the most frequent words of English and were taken from a corpus of written English.

General Service List (GSL)

11

The Academic Word List (AWL) was developed by Averil Coxhead in 2000 as her MA thesis at the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

The list contains 570 word families which were selected according to principles. The list does not include words that are in the most frequent 2000 words of English (GSL).

The 570 words are divided into 10 Groups. The Groups are ordered such that the words in the first Group are the most frequent words and those in the last Group are the least frequent.

AWL is not restricted to a specific field of study.

Academic Word Lists

12

We use a before words that begin with a consonant sound.Some words start with vowel letter but begin with a consonant

sound, so we use a before these words, too: a University a European a one-parent family

We use an before words that begin with a vowel sound: an orange an Italian an umbrella

Include words that begin with a silent letter ‘h’: an hour an honor an honest child

Using a or an

13

Abbreviations said as individual letters that begin with A, E, F, H, I, L, M, N, O, R, S or X: (an)

an MP an FBI agent

But compare abbreviations said as words: (a) a NATO general (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) a FIFA official (Federation of International Football

Associations)

Using a or an (continue)

14

References

[1] Olsen, A.(2009) Academic Vocabulary: Academic Words. 4th edition. Longman. [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Service_List[3] http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/resources/academicwordlist/[4] Murphy, R. (2005) English grammar in use. 4th edition. Cambridge University Press.

15

Q & A