In addition to movies, television programs, and TED Talks presentations, podcasts are an increasingly popular form of media that promotes authentic public discourse for diverse audiences, including university professors and students. However, English language teachers in the English as a second language/English as a foreign language contexts might wonder: “How do I know that my students can handle the vocabulary demands of podcasts?” To answer that question, we have analyzed a 1,137,163-word corpus comprising transcripts from 170 podcast episodes derived from the following popular podcasts: Freakonomics; Fresh Air; Invisibilia; Hidden Brain; How I Built This; Radiolab; TED Radio Hour; This American Life; and Today Explained. The results showed that knowledge about the most frequent 3000 word families plus proper nouns (PN), marginal words (MW), transparent compounds (TC), and acronyms (AC) provided 96.75% coverage, and knowledge about the most frequent 5000 word families, including PN, MW, TC, and AC provided 98.26% coverage. The analysis also showed that there is some variation in coverage among podcast types. The pedagogical implications for teaching and learning vocabulary via podcasts are discussed.

Teachers of English are often in search of authentic audio and video materials that promote learners’ listening comprehension and vocabulary development. TED Talks, a set of freely available web presentations, could be a useful resource to promote vocabulary instruction. The present replication study examines the lexical coverage of TED Talks by using a corpus comprised of TED Talks presentations. Transcripts of 400 presentations (a total running time of 100 hr and 19 min) were analyzed to determine the vocabulary size necessary to understand 95% and 98% of the words in TED Talks presentations. The findings suggest that 4,000 word families (plus proper nouns and marginal words) provided 95% coverage, and 8,000 word families (plus proper nouns and marginal words) provided 98% of TED Talks presentations. The current study confirms the findings from previous studies that analyzed TED Talks (Coxhead & Walls, ) and academic spoken English (Dang & Webb, ), suggesting that a wider range of vocabulary (closer to vocabulary coverage for written texts) is necessary to watch and comprehend TED Talks presentations. Based on the findings, the present article provides English language teachers with several learner‐friendly suggestions about how TED Talks presentations could be used to expand learners’ vocabulary.

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