Incidental vocabulary acquisition from listening to English teacher education lectures: A case study from Macau higher education

Abstract

Some proponents of higher education English as a medium of instruction (EMI) have suggested listening to English lectures provides students the opportunity to incidentally acquire unknown words. A case study was designed to examine this assumption. First, the lexical profiles of 27 Introduction to English Language Teaching first-year undergraduate course lectures were computed to determine how many words students need to know for comprehension. Then an incoming year-1 undergraduate student with an English vocabulary size of 7,500 word families and mastery of the most frequent 3,000 word families listened to these lectures across 13.5 weeks with the purpose of measuring incidental acquisition gains of three aspects of word knowledge for ten targeted words. Lastly, the student’s perceptions about listening to EMI lectures and potentials for this listening inducing incidental acquisition of word knowledge were gathered through a semi-structured interview. The lexical profiling of the entire corpus showed students need knowledge of the most frequent 4,000 English word families plus proper nouns and marginal words for 98% lexical coverage; however, some lectures present students with a more substantial lexical burden than the lectures overall. The student made the most gains in receptive meaning, followed by receptive form, and finally productive meaning. Content analysis of the interview transcript found seven themes representing the student’s perception about listening to EMI lectures and their potential for inducing incidental vocabulary acquisition. While the student found listening to the EMI lectures challenging, he perceived the process as useful in preparing for university studies and a career as a secondary English teacher. The student perceived attention, topic, existing vocabulary knowledge, lecturer’s native language, and lack of interaction with the lecturer to have moderated incidental learning of vocabulary through listening to English lectures. These results indicate a need to confirm whether incoming students’ vocabulary knowledge meet the lexical demands of the EMI lectures given in the Macau context. Furthermore, pedagogical training on teacher talk strategies and orientation training for incoming students should both be provided to ensure students are receiving high quality instruction.

EMI Vocabulary Support in High School Mathematics: A Quasi-experimental Study in Taiwan

“…Some subjects may be inherently more challenging to teach or learn in a second language, requiring a higher level of language proficiency, especially vocabulary knowledge, from both teachers and students . For example, teaching and learning advanced mathematics or scientific concepts in English may demand a higher level of vocabulary size and depth (Reynolds et al, 2023).…”

The potentials for incidental vocabulary acquisition from listening to computer science academic lectures: a higher education corpus-based case study from Macau

“…While there are some studies that have been conducted on the potentials of incidental vocabulary acquisition through the listening to teacher talk or limited English lecturing (e.g., Horst, 2010 ; Jin and Webb, 2020 ), these studies have not adequately addressed whether or not it is feasible for students to acquire vocabulary through enrolment in EMI programs of study. One exception was a case study by Reynolds et al (2022) , that examined how listening to English language teaching EMI lectures for a single course could result in a modest amount of incidental learning of vocabulary. However, more understanding of the potentials for incidental vocabulary acquisition in other disciplines, such as computer science, is needed, as discipline differences in EMI programs ( Peng and Xie, 2021 ) may pose varied vocabulary demands and target learning outcome that are linked to students’ command of specialized vocabulary.…”

“…In the research literature, lexical coverage in combination with several other variables has been deemed indicative of comprehension. The lexical coverage figures of 95% and 98% have been used in a number of lexical profiling spoken academic discourse studies (e.g., Dang and Webb, 2014 ; Dang, 2022 ; Reynolds et al, 2022 ), and the use of these figures as conventions in corpus studies has arrived from an increasing number of studies advocating 95% or 98% lexical coverage as an adequate coverage of lexis allowing for reasonable understanding of language input (e.g., Hu and Nation, 2000 ; Laufer, 2020 ; Song and Reynolds, 2022a , b ; inter alia ). Accordingly, the present study builds upon these previous studies’ findings and discussions (e.g., Dang and Webb, 2014 ; Dang, 2022 ; Reynolds et al, 2022 ) regarding lexical coverage.…”

“…As for the open-access non-EMI lectures, students needed to understand the most frequent 8,000 word families to achieve the same 98% coverage. Recently, Reynolds et al (2022) found that in order to reach 98% coverage of the EMI lectures in an Introduction to English Language Teaching course offered in a Macau higher education institution, students needed a vocabulary size of the most frequent 4,000 word families, proper nouns, and marginal words. However, there are several disciplines, such as computer science investigated in the present study, that have yet to be examined.…”

Exploring Undergraduate Students’ Digital Multitasking in Class: An Empirical Study in China

“…Mobile phones in the classroom allow students to record audio or video, take pictures of lecturers' instructions on the board or screen, share study-related documents among their peers, and enhance communications with teachers beyond the class. Mobile phones have provided essential assistance to college students in class [3][4][5], in finishing coursework [6], and in exam preparation [7]. As digital natives, students believe that smartphones have become an integral part of their lives [8].…”