The Vocabulary Coverage in American Television Programs: A Corpus-Based Study

Autor: Yang-Ting Chou, 周揚亭
Rok vydání: 2014
Druh dokumentu: 學位論文 ; thesis
Popis: 102
In EFL context, learners of English are hardly exposed to ample language input. Television program, combining properties as those in reading and listening programs, is a source of motivating language input for EFL learners. However, television programs have not been widely investigated as a source of authentic materials for language learning. While much of the research suggested there was great potential for learning vocabulary through media exposure, it was intriguing for the researcher that how much learners can comprehend with learned vocabulary coverage. The study set out to investigate what vocabulary size is needed to comprehend authentic American television programs. The purposes of the study are: (1) to examine to what extent do the BNC lists and the latest combination of the BNC lists with the COCA lists reach the vocabulary coverage of 95% and 98% respectively through watching authentic American television programs, (2) to investigate what vocabulary size is needed for different genres to reach 95% and 98% coverage for American television programs in the BNC lists and the BNC/COCA lists respectively, and (3) to investigate the vocabulary not found in the BNC lists and the BNC/COCA lists. In addition, the comparisons between the results of the two sets of lists were also discussed. The scripts of 7,279 episodes of sixty television programs consisting of 31,323,019 running words were analyzed using Range program (Heatley et al. 2002) with the BNC lists and the BNC/COCA lists respectively. Qualitative analysis was also carried out to examine the differences between coverage in television programs by the two sets of lists. The analysis yielded several interesting findings. First, the most frequent word families varying from 2,000 to 7,000 plus proper nouns and marginal words in the BNC lists could provide 95% coverage. In the BNC/COCA lists, a vocabulary size varying from 2,000 to 6,000 word families would provide 95% coverage for the television programs. To reach 98% coverage, a vocabulary size of 5,000 to over 14,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words were needed. Second, as 95% coverage was suggested to be sufficient for adequate comprehension (Laufer, 1989; Rodgers & Webb, 2011; Webb, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c; Webb & Rodgers, 2010a, 2010b), television programs of serial dramas and serial supernatural dramas would be the least demanding. Procedurals and serial medical dramas were the most challenging programs in the present study since they needed a larger vocabulary size to comprehend the television programs. Sitcoms, however, were dependent on the topics, which varied the most among all the genres in the present study. Third, the words Not Found in Any Lists were basically proper nouns, marginal words, transparent compounds, and abbreviations, which were the four lists, added on to the BNC/COCA lists. The two sets of lists included almost complete vocabulary; however, the study also found that the new-forming word, such as Facebook, was not found in the lists, suggesting that the vocabulary be ever-growing in a language. The comparison of the word families in the BNC and BNC/COCA lists providing 95% and 98% coverage showed that both the lists could provide 95% coverage for the television programs at the 4,000- and 3,000-word level respectively. However, with the proper nouns added in the BNC/COCA lists, which could provide 98% coverage at the 10,000-word level, the BNC lists could not provide 98% coverage. The findings also suggested that with the most frequent 3,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words, adequate comprehension could occur. Based on the findings in the present study, further pedagogical implications and possible directions for future studies were discussed in detail.
Databáze: Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations
Externí odkaz: