Peter Wingrove

The Open University (UK) · Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies

This article conducts Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) on a corpus of TED talks (2463 talks, across 427 topic tags) to create a new Multi-Dimensional model. The resultant model contained seven dimensions: i. ‘Spontaneous involved versus edited informational discourse’, ii. ‘Abstract informational versus narrative discourse’, iii. ‘Human-world orie...

The coverage of academic lexis is compared in a TED talk corpus (2,483 talks, 5,068,781 words) and a corpus of Yale University lectures (708 lectures, 5,523,791 words). Academic lexis is defined by the Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000), the Academic Vocabulary List (Gardner & Davies, 2014), and the Academic Spoken Word List (Dang et al., 2017). In...

Measuring lists of lexis across corpora is a well-established method in corpus linguistics. This article takes a novel approach and measures the frequency of occurrence of the Academic Formulas List (AFL; Simpson-Vlach & Ellis, 2010) across academic lectures (OYCLC) and an academic-adjacent corpus of TED talks (TTC). Frequency of occurrence is meas...

To investigate the suitability of TED talks for academic listening in EAP contexts, this research paper compares Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) representation (Gardner & Davies, 2014), lexical density, and speech rate in a TED talk corpus and a lecture discourse corpus, which were both compiled for this study. 28 lecture series (727 lectures total)...