Educational Materials for the SDGs
Welcome! Here you will find Version 1.1 of the SDGs Service List and some accompanying educational materials, including electronic vocabulary cards and sample articles for use with ESL students. These materials have been created to provide English language learners with a study tool to learn some of the most important vocabulary items they need to know when reading materials related to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The words from the SDGs Service List are used in combination with the first 1800 most frequent words of English, making this service list particularly useful for learners at or above the Early-Upper Intermediate level on the ERF Graded Reader Scale. In the second stage of this project, we plan to produce a collection of 17 graded readers and other level-appropriate materials. For each of the 17 SDGs, the authors will select important vocabulary items from the SDGs Service List related to that particular SDG and use a variety of vocabulary-building activities to pre-teach the words before the reading. With a pre-existing knowledge of the high-frequency vocabulary, learners can easily read the surrounding text while focusing on the new SDG vocabulary. Thank you for your interest!
Robert Sheridan, Kindai University
Kathryn Tanaka, University of Hyogo
Robert Swier, Kindai University
Version 1.1 of the SDGs Service List: Vocabulary for Society and Sustainability
SDGs Service List ver. 1.1 (Google Spreadsheet)
SDGs Service List Quizlet Study Sets and Games
Unit Materials for Lessons
Unit 3: Labor Issues Affecting Children and Youth
About
During the creation of these resources, the researchers collected a 1.13-million-word corpus of materials about the SDGs published online from September 2015 until the end of July 2022.
After the corpus was created, AntWordProfiler (Anthony, 2022), a tool for profiling the lexical difficulty and complexity of texts, was used to profile the contents of the corpus. Parameters were set to categorize the words of the corpus as either ‘in list,’ ‘out,’ or proper nouns. ‘In list’ words were defined as the 1st - 20,000th most frequent words of English and ‘out’ words were items that appeared above the 20,000th most frequent word. All proper nouns and the majority of ‘out’ words were eliminated from the output list. There were some important exceptions, however. ‘Out’ words such as SDG(s), microplastic, statelessness, and policymaking, for example, were kept because of their importance when discussing topics related to the SDGs. All of the ‘in list’ items that appeared in the corpus 50 times or more were also kept for consideration. Finally, the authors went through the remaining ‘in list’ items. After deliberation, 24 words that appeared outside the parameter of 50 occurrences, but were deemed necessary for creating graded readers because of their immediate relevance to the SDGs, were included. The output for the frequency and rank of the vocabulary items can be found on the second worksheet tab of this Excel file.
Finally, the parts of speech (POS) were added next to each vocabulary item on the service list. Definitions were not added to the service list itself; however, the 600-word SDGs Service List was divided into 15 bands of 40 vocabulary items, and electronic study sets were created on Quizlet. Instead of just listing the most common meaning and/or part of speech of each word, which many vocabulary service lists do, words with multiple meanings and/or parts of speech were investigated within the context of this corpus. Based on their usage in the corpus, appropriate definitions were selected from the definitions automatically generated by Quizlet, after which the lead researcher manually added additional part(s) of speech. After completing the study sets, the definitions were again revisited by the authors, and revisions were made when necessary.
We would like to thank Dr. Rob Waring of Notre Dame Seishin University for his valuable guidance, advice, feedback, and patience. Without him, this project would not have been possible.