Vocabulary Demands of Television Programs

Abstract

This study investigated vocabulary coverage and the number of encounters of lowfrequency vocabulary in television programs. Eighty-eight television programs consisting of 264,384 running words were categorized according to genre. Television shows were classified as either British or American and then put into the following genres: news, drama, situation comedy, older programs, children's programs, and science fiction. The results showed that knowledge of the most frequent 3,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words provided 95.45% coverage, and knowledge of the most frequent 7,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words provided 98.27% coverage. The vocabulary size necessary to gain 95% coverage of the different genres ranged from 2,000 to 4,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words; 5,000 to 9,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words to gain 98% coverage. The analysis also indicated that there was great variation in coverage between episodes. The results showed that there were relatively few encounters with low-frequency vocabulary. However, if learners knew the most frequent 3,000 word families and they watched at least an hour of television a day, there is the potential for significant incidental vocabulary learning.There is little doubt that television provides a massive amount of first language (L1) input. Research suggests that people watch television in their native language from 3 (Statistics Canada, 2004) to 7 (Literacy Trust, 2006) hours a dayThe authors wish to thank Paul Nation, Victoria University of Wellington, for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article, and the anonymous reviewers, for their useful comments.

Selecting Television Programs for Language Learning: Investigating Television Programs from the Same Genre

“…They suggested that for learners with the appropriate vocabulary size, increased viewing should lead to increased vocabulary learning because research on incidental vocabulary learning has shown that the more unknown words are encountered in context, the more likely they are to be learned (Horst, Cobb, & Meara, 1998;Jenkins, Stein, & Wysocki, 1984;Rott, 1999;Saragi, Nation, & Meister, 1978;Waring & Takaki, 2003;Webb, 2007). Webb and Rodgers (2009a) findings also shed light on differences between television genres. Children's programs were found to have the smallest vocabulary load; the most frequent 2000 word families, plus proper nouns and marginal words accounted for 95% coverage.…”

“…In a corpus-driven study looking at the number of words needed to understand the vocabulary in television programs, Webb and Rodgers (2009a) found that a vocabulary size of 3000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words provided 95.45% coverage of a corpus made up of 88 television programs from a variety of genres. They reported that knowing the most frequent 3000 word families may be sufficient for adequate comprehension of television programs and that a learning approach which involved regular viewing could lead to large incidental vocabulary learning gains.…”

Learning L2 Vocabulary with American TV Drama From the Learner’s Perspective

“…Moreover, Nation (2006) proposed that 98 % coverage of vocabulary is "ideal" for vocabulary comprehension of television programs. Then, Webb and Rodgers (2009) investigated the vocabulary demands of American television programs such as news, drama, science fiction, children's programs, older programs, and situation comedies and found that American drama reached 95% coverage of 3,000 most frequent word families and 98% coverage of 6,000 word families compared to American news' 95% coverage of 4,000 word families and 98% coverage of 8,000 word families and children's program's 95% coverage of 2,000 word families and 98% of 5,000 word families. According to their results, we might hypothesize that the vocabulary level of American drama seems to be higher than American children's programs and lower than American news.…”

Learning vocabulary through meaning-focused input: Replication of Elley (1989) and Liu & Nation (1985)

“…Studies of lexical coverage have indicated the importance of vocabulary for comprehension of both written and spoken input (Schmitt, Jiang & Grabe 2011;van Zeeland & Schmitt 2013a), as well as the vocabulary sizes that may indicate comprehension of different discourse types (Meara 1991(Meara , 1993Hirsh & Nation 1992;Adolphs & Schmitt 2003;Nation 2006;Webb & Rodgers 2009a, 2009b. Despite the interest that this line of research has generated, Liu & Nation's (1985) study remains the only one that has looked at how lexical coverage affects guessing from context.…”

“…These studies have in turn contributed to greater focus in the research literature on the number of words necessary to reach the lexical coverage points associated with comprehension of spoken discourse (e.g. Nation 2006;Webb & Rodgers 2009a, 2009bRodgers & Webb 2011) and written (Hirsh & Nation 1992;Adolphs & Schmitt 2003;Nation 2006;Webb & Macalister 2013), as well as the potential to incidentally learn vocabulary through comprehensible input (Webb 2010). Liu & Nation's (1985) study indicated that lexical coverage affects the potential to successfully guess words from context; there is a better chance of successfully inferring unknown words in texts with a higher lexical coverage than passages with a lower lexical coverage.…”