Are Academic English Words Learned Incidentally? A Canadian Case Study

Investigating the Lexical Demands of English-as-an-Additional-Language and General-Audience Podcasts and Their Potential for Incidental Vocabulary Learning

“…Incidental vocabulary learning is a line of research that is receiving much attention, defined as "learning words without deliberate decision to commit information to memory" (Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001, p. 11). Research into incidental vocabulary learning through reading is well-established (e.g., Freimuth, 2020;Pellicer-Sánchez & Schmitt, 2010). Recently, a number of studies have also focused on incidental vocabulary learning from listening to different sources of linguistic input (e.g., Feng & Webb, 2019;Horst, 2010;Jin & Webb, 2020;Pavia et al, 2019;Peters & Webb, 2018;Rodgers & Webb, 2020;van Zeeland & Schmitt, 2013a;Vidal, 2011).…”

“…Another strategy is listening to an episode multiple times, as also suggested by Pavia et al (2019) for songs, because this provides an opportunity for listeners to be exposed to words several times, increasing the chance of incidental learning. Despite the necessity of increased listening time for fully learning words, a few encounters or even single encounters, as shown for extensive reading (Freimuth, 2020), are not completely futile, laying the foundation for a partial grasp of word knowledge (Webb, 2007).…”