Narrow Viewing: The Vocabulary in Related Television Programs

Abstract

In this study, the scripts of 288 television episodes were analyzed to determine the extent to which vocabulary reoccurs in related and unrelated television programs, and the potential for incidental vocabulary learning through watching one season (approximately 24 episodes) of television programs. The scripts consisted of 1,330,268 running words and had a total running time of 203 hours and 49 minutes with a mean running time of 42 minutes. The vocabulary from a single season of six individual television programs (142 episodes) was compared with six sets of random television programs (146 episodes). The results indicated that, when there are an equivalent number of running words, related television programs are likely to contain fewer word families than unrelated programs. The findings also indicated that word families from the 4,000-14,000 levels were more likely to reoccur in a complete season of a television program than in random television programs. The percentage of lowfrequency word families encountered 10 or more times was higher, and the percentage of word families encountered once was fewer in all six programs than in the random television programs.

Incidental Learning of Collocation

“…It would also be useful to look at the degree to which collocations are encountered in different types of text. It may be that, while collocations are relatively infrequent within a corpus, they may be more frequent within an individual text of a reasonable length or related texts, in the same way that single‐word items are (see, e.g., Hwang & Nation, 1989; Rodgers & Webb, 2011; Schmitt & Carter, 2000; Sutarsyah, Nation, & Kennedy, 1994). However, Boers and Lindstromberg's (2009) analysis of the first 120 pages of a novel indicated that this may not occur to the same degree for collocations.…”

The Effect of Content Retelling on Vocabulary Uptake From a TED Talk

“…Much research has been concerned with vocabulary acquisition from reading (and to a lesser extent from listening), but the growing popularity of audiovisual materials calls for more investigations of their affordances for vocabulary acquisition. Some studies have already demonstrated the potential of authentic audiovisual materials for this purpose (e.g., Rodgers & Webb, ; Webb, ), and there are grounds for believing that audiovisual input offers affordances that are absent from audio input alone (Vanderplank, ).…”

Multimodal Input for Italian Beginner Learners of English

“…They also tend to create affective engagement, encouraging the viewer to watch many related episodes (Vanderplank 2010). Watching successive episodes, in particular, builds on the same background knowledge of the plot and characters, and also entails lower vocabulary load and higher potential for incidental vocabulary learning than watching unrelated programs (Rodgers, Webb 2011). Moreover, the dialogues of TV series tend to resemble spontaneous conversation more than the speech of other audiovisual genres such as documentaries and news broadcasts.…”