One way to do this is to hand out a glossary and ask students to contribute new words, building the resource year on year. It is likely to be a more dynamic and collaborative tool if you collect unfamiliar disciplinary vocabulary whilst teaching by, for example, setting up a flip chart and asking students to alert you to a new word as you or others use it. Simply jotting the word down usually does not interfere with the flow of the ideas and content of the session, and if the same list is posted week after week, a bespoke resource will emerge.

A colleague has added a twist to this idea by handing out yellow cards to students who need only lift one to alert her to the use of a new word without drawing undue attention during a session. Students said they liked this approach because they did not want to interrupt the teacher and they could learn vocabulary in context.

— Carroll, 2005a, p. 41

Discipline-specific specialist terms ('jargon'):

"After years of using what others call jargon, academics view the language of their discipline as straightforward and often as the most accurate and efficient way to explain ideas" ( Carroll, 2005a, p. 39). But that mental shorthand can be impenetrable to those at the beginning of their apprenticeship to the discipline; and of course one of the aims of the apprenticeship is for the student to become adept at using this specialised language.

As we note below, the systematic relations between the conceptual categories of a discipline often lend themselves to graphic representation in some form of concept map.

Culture-specific knowledge items:

– Words, phrases, acronyms, proper names, relating to local culture specific events and phenomena which someone coming from outside Australia is unlikely to be familiar with; these might include special senses and metaphorical or quasi-slang uses of standard English words and phrases. A few random examples:

• the ACTU
• the PM
• the AFL
• the Apple Isle
• the names of Australia's Parliamentary political parties (you might include these in a "Personalities" list -- see below)
• koori, noongar
• a tall poppy

Metaphors:

Metaphors and analogies are forms of verbal gymnastics that fox students and can scupper their chances of understanding what you mean. Sometimes, as in the last sentence, metaphors and analogies are obvious but usually, speakers are unaware that their mentions of landslide victories, parent companies or brownfield sites include these forms of speech. Metaphors not only confuse novice speakers, they also rely on significant amounts of cultural knowledge.

If you do use them, research has shown that people remember them better when told the origin rather than the meaning. For example, a colleague on a recruiting tour of Southeast Asia heard locals referring to one university’s agents as ‘ wild chickens’. Explaining that this meant they were not selective was less helpful than being told that wild chickens eat everything in the forest.

Since there is not time to explain in many cases, avoiding metaphors may be best, though this usually requires a combination of self-policing (a metaphor?) and encouraging students to alert you when you have used one.

— Carroll, 2005a, p. 40-1

Problem terms:

– Terms that students commonly misunderstand or misuse; items you might make a list of while marking written assignments.

The personalities in your field might include:

• the authors of the works on the reading list
• other significant researchers and practitioners who have influenced the field

and also:

• the names of institutions – research, government, industrial or otherwise – that anyone in your field should be aware of.

Alphabetical order is, of course, meaningless. It creates no associations between items and may well make a list of items harder for a student to learn rather than easier.

Alphabetical order is useful only for the purpose of locating an item in a hard-copy list, and is superseded in any electronic document by the search/find function in the program you use to read the document.

Subdividing a list with relevant category headings obviously adds meaning to the list, but it takes time and thought to do. Category headings are not always easy to decide on, and some terms can be very hard to place.

The order of the list as you have it reflects the order in which your students encountered the items in class: it has the potential to stimulate recall of the lecture or in-class discussion, which should make the items easier to learn and recall.

Of course, there may be subgroups within your list which it makes sense to list together under an appropriate heading – or even to present the form of a labelled diagram, a tree-diagram or a concept map. Beyond that, if you want to make a longish list more manageable, the most useful structure you can impose on it is likely to be subheadings relating to the students' experience of the course: "Week 1"; "Lecture 3"; "Tutorial Week 5"; ….

Definitions:

In themselves verbal definitions can be useful; they can also be either simplistic or opaque, particularly for non-native speakers.

However, an exercise in which students match glossary items with definitions can be a useful diagnostic test in some circumstances.

So can an exercise in which you ask groups of students to collaborate in writing definitions of particular terms.

Examples of usage in context:

Phrases, sentences and short paragraphs showing how terms are used by professional writers can be particularly useful for students, especially if they show the term in a variety of grammatical and conceptual contexts. Collecting such examples of usage is an exercise which students can be asked or recommended to undertake for themselves and/or for the class. For the sake of good practice you might require that these examples be not only copied correctly from their sources, but appropriately referenced as well.

Electronic documents, of course, lend themselves to this sort of data-gathering. For example, consider the following:

1. Select three different papers in .pdf or .doc form, each by a different writer
2. Give each paper to a different group of students
3. Ask the students to use the search/find function of the relevant program to locate and collate instances of the target term. (you might want to advise them to look for cultur rather than culture in order to pick up cultural, culturally, cultured, acculturate as well.)
4. Ask the groups to comment on and compare their findings.

As a practising teacher, you doubtless keep a little list of your own examples of the way students misuse particular terms. It can be both amusing and instructive to produce a few of these examples in class, once the students are getting the hang of the appropriate usages.

Illustrations:

Graphic illustrations can sometimes convey meaning more effectively than text, and are worth collecting to make available to students, and to use in class as prompts for group and whole-class discussions. They might include:

• images
  • line graphics
  • photos
  • video clips
• concept maps and mind-maps
• charts and diagrams

Sound clips:

In some disciplines more than others, the pronunciation of polysyllabic technical terms can be a real problem for any student, native or non-native speaker, and with less confident students may well be enough to inhibit their active participation in class discussions. These days it takes very little time or effort to record a word-list as an MP3 file and make it available to students via the web. If it is part of your normal practice to record your lectures, then making those recordings available to your students, as MP3 files or as streaming audio, will provide further aural input for those who want it.

Vision-impaired students might well prefer to hear the list in your voice rather than in the mechanical tones of a screen-reader.

For non-native speakers it's not just terms like deoxyribonucleic acid that cause problems. Word-recognition in English depends very much on putting the stress on the right syllable, and misplaced stresses can make a foreign accent all the harder to understand. For students with problems in these areas you might want to include word-families like analyse, analysis, analytical, analytically, or economy, economics, economic, economical, uneconomic.