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How suitable are TED talks for academic listening?
Abstract
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) and 49 TED talks were analysed for AVL representation. TED talks were found to have lower AVL representation than the university lectures (t(75) = 4.95, p < 0.0001). 43 one-minute samples from the Lecture Discourse Corpus and 47 one-minute samples from the TED Talk Corpus were analysed for lexical density, where no differences were found; and speech rate, which was found to be significantly faster in TED talks, in terms of syllables per second (t(98) = 4.23, p < 0.0001) and words per minute (t(98) = 4.20, p < 0.0001). A negative correlation was found between lexical density and syllables per second in the lecture discourse corpus (r = −0.343, p < 0.05), where none was found in the TED talk corpus (r = −0.031, ns), perhaps due to TED talks being a scripted genre. It is concluded that TED talk variation enables a range of academic listening applications.
... Similar to the current study that suggests the suitability of TED-Ed videos for EFL learners at every CEFR level, Wingrove (2017) suggested that the speech rate of TED-Talks is suitable for EFL learners. Although Wingrove (2017) used TED Talks as his research object, the result of his study is still comparable to the result of the current study. ...
... Similar to the current study that suggests the suitability of TED-Ed videos for EFL learners at every CEFR level, Wingrove (2017) suggested that the speech rate of TED-Talks is suitable for EFL learners. Although Wingrove (2017) used TED Talks as his research object, the result of his study is still comparable to the result of the current study. His result is especially comparable to the average speech rate of the Talks-type videos of TED-Ed. ...
... Unlike the other types of videos on TED-Ed, this type of video is presented in a seminar or speech-like format, making it indistinguishable from TED-Talks. Wingrove (2017) found that the mean speech rate of TED Talks was 160 WPM, which is slightly different from the talk-type videos' mean score of 194 WPM. Although the number is stated as faster than Yale's collections of lectures, it is still considered at the normal and comprehensible level in WPM. ...
Listening proficiency is essential in language acquisition, yet both its classroom time and research are overshadowed by other skills, such as speaking and reading. To tackle the issue of limited classroom time, extensive listening is one of the most convenient and effective solutions. Selecting the materials, however, needs an equally extensive effort; especially for the authentic ones. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the speech rate and vocabulary level of TED-Ed videos as one of the sources of authentic material for extensive listening to determine their suitability for EFL learners. The research used a quantitative descriptive design with purposive sampling. The data collection of Speech Rate is conducted by transcribing the sample videos and dividing the number of words by the length of the video, and the result is measured in terms of WPM (Word Per Minute). To get the vocabulary level, the video transcripts are put into the Vocabkitchen website to analyze the vocabulary CEFR level for each word. From the analysis, the average speech rate of TED-Ed videos is 147.4 WPM and it is suitable for all levels of EFL learners, including beginner level. Meanwhile, the CEFR level of the vocabulary is more suitable for intermediate EFL learners and beyond.
... coxhead, 2000;Nation, 2001;coxhead & Hirsh, 2007). Other selection criteria may include the rate of delivery and lexical density (Wingrove, 2017;Liu, 2021), given that speech which is too fast or which includes too much information within a certain timeframe may be difficult for some learners to understand and follow. Another important criterion would be that the materials should be engaging, to help learners' motivation. ...
... The EAP and EST courses which we here have in mind are those taught to university students, i.e. adults, who learn English as their L2. The study fits into a recent and expanding body of related studies, which includes: csomay and Petrović's (2012) investigation into the legal vocabulary in movies and TV series on the topic of law and order, so as to assess these two genres' suitability for Legal English instruction, Wingrove's (2017) investigation into the use of TEd talks for academic listening practice, rolls and rodgers' (2017) investigation into the suitability of science fiction and fantasy for EST, Hiltunen and Tyrkkö's study of academic vocabulary in Wikipedia articles for EAP purposes (2018), Vuković-Stamatović's study of the vocabulary in various physics genres (2020), dang's analysis of the presence of specialised vocabulary in medical TV programmes (2020), Liu's investigation into the use of TEd talks in English for medicine (2023), Zhang's study of the suitability of TEd Talks for English for Humanities (2022), and Vuković-Stamatović's study on the adequacy of science documentaries for EST (2022). ...
... Bearing the above in mind, the aim of this paper is to contribute to answering how suitable science podcasts may be for EAP and EST listening in terms of their lexical profile, lexical density and speech rate. Inspired by Nesi (2001), the use of these three criteria for assessing a genre's suitability for specialised contexts of teaching English was applied by Wingrove (2017), and following Wingrove, by Liu (2021) and Vuković-Stamatović (2022). The choice of the three criteria as those which critically impact listening comprehension is further supported by other studies. ...
One potential source of authentic input for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and English for Science and Technology (EST) listening could be science podcasts. In this study, we examine the vocabulary level of this genre, as well as the amount of the common specialized, i.e. academic and scientific vocabulary it contains. Additionally, we study its lexical density and speech rate. These properties are examined on a corpus of 126 science podcasts produced by the journal Nature, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the magazine Scientific American. These are compared against those determined for a corpus of lectures in general (the MICASE lectures) and a corpus of science lectures in particular (the MICASE’s science-lecture subsection). On the one hand, science podcasts were found to contain a good amount of both academic and scientific vocabulary, as well as to have a very similar lexical density to that of lectures. On the other hand, their vocabulary level and speech rate were somewhat higher than those of lectures. Based on the analysis, we recommend the use of science podcasts for both EAP and EST listening for advanced learners. For learners with lower proficiencies, vocabulary support and/or adjusting the speed of the science podcasts is advised.
... Within educational spaces, TED talks are recommended for a variety of purposes and outcomes including academic listening practice (Al-Badi, 2020;de Chazal, 2014;Kryeziu & Rugova, 2018;Taibi et al 2015, Wingrove, 2017, developing note-taking skills (Усмонова 2020), to improve academic lexis (Astika & Kurniawan, 2020;Wingrove, 2022), and have been used successfully to develop students' writing skills (Kryeziu & Rugova, 2018). Wingrove (2022), observed TED talks on academic topics are "likely to have high levels of general academic lexis" (p. ...
... Twenty-first century students communicate best in familiar digital environments which provide an increasingly richer context for learning (Palma de Schrynemakers, 2014). TED talks are often described as "authentic" material in the discourse regarding their use in English language learning (Astika & Kurniawan, 2020;de Chazal, 2014;Elk, 2014;Vu & Tran, 2023;Wingrove, 2017). ...
... 596). In an exploration on the suitability of TED talks for developing academic listening skills, Wingrove (2017) observed "some TED talks are suitably similar to lecture discourse… but on average they are not" (p. 93, emphasis original). ...
Lecturers in the University of Adelaide's preparatory program (UPP) observed a recent reduction of engagement with course readings by the student cohort. Two proposed solutions included formative quizzes based on the readings and including TED-talks as course readings. This research explored the validity of employing ChatGPT to design formative assessments to measure student learning and engagement with TED-talks. Formative assessment in 21 st century Higher Education typically engages multidimensional approaches through alternative and online activities. Broad approaches can enhance student autonomy and enable more diverse opportunities for students to demonstrate their learning, and thereby enhance learning outcomes. The use of TED-talks as a teaching tool has become increasingly popular across a variety of disciplines and they are now a common resource in hybrid or flipped classrooms. They can be linked with topics from the curriculum and offer accessible, nonthreatening, and approachable ways to engage diverse student cohorts. Transcriptions of TED-talks were submitted to ChatGPT along with prompts engineered to elicit maximally valuable formative assessment questions across three styles: Multiple Choice, True/False and Fill-in-the-Blank. The research addressed the following questions: Can GenAI develop meaningful assessment questions to assess the level of engagement and/or understanding of TED-talk content? Does more comprehensive prompt engineering result in more valuable responses? Three levels of prompts were developed from very basic to progressively more detailed and contextualised. The research found ChatGPT required well-crafted prompts and progressive training to generate meaningful and relevant responses. Although ChatGPT can produce potentially viable draft formative quiz questions, strategic prompt engineering with detail and context will produce more valuable results. However, they will still need further human input to make them meaningfully useable to accurately assess student learning and engagement.
... For instance, comparing the lexical coverage of the AWL against the AVL ( Gardner and Davies, 2013 ), concluding that the greater coverage the AVL achieves is indicative of a more suitable list. We can also note that instances where a list of general academic lexis covers academic disciplines unevenly suggests that a list may be less suitable as a list of general academic lexis, such as the AVL achieving lower coverage across humanities lectures compared to social science and natural science lectures ( Wingrove, 2017 ). Currently, as the AFL has not been profiled across any corpora it is unknown whether it can be concluded to be a broadly representative list of academic content or if it represents disciplines unevenly. ...
... This suggests that much like the AFL's lexical cousin, the AVL, the AFL has some inherent biases towards certain academic disciplines. Note that the AVL has been found to disfavour the humanities in relation to other academic disciplines ( Durrant, 2016 ;Wingrove, 2017 ). ...
... When intra-corpus variation was investigated evidence of bias was uncovered, with the AFL having the highest representation across hard science disciplines, followed by social science, followed by the humanities. This is consistent with prior research which has investigated lexical coverage, such as the AVL gaining lower coverage in humanities disciplines ( Durrant, 2016 ;Wingrove, 2017 ), despite pains taken to balance the corpora the list is derived from Gardner and Davies (2013 ). These data strengthen the argument that discipline-specific lists are more appropriate than general academic lists ( Hyland and Tse, 2007 ). ...
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 measured at three levels: overall inter- and intra-corpus variation; the composition of representation, to see which formulas are represented; and an investigation of the behaviour of formulas within texts. The corpora were found to be significantly different from each other in terms of overall representation with a medium effect size. The greatest difference concerned referential expressions and the smallest difference concerned stance expressions. In terms of intra-corpus variation the AFL was found to occur less often in the humanities and most often in the natural sciences for both corpora. The composition of coverage revealed Zipfian distributions for the AFL, with both corpora presenting a similar set of high frequency formulas within each group category. A combined ratio and minimum frequency measure identified salient formulas to each corpus. Concerning formula behaviour, differences were found between the corpora concerning the use of the same formulas. Pedagogic and methodological implications are discussed in the conclusion.
... Prior research has made some progress in this direction. A previous study found that the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL; Gardner & Davies, 2014) covered 6.56% of TED talks on average, compared to 9.35% of academic lectures (Wingrove, 2017). However, this research was limited in terms of corpus size (49 talks), scope (only technology, design, and entertainment talks) and in the measure of academic content, which only considered written academic vocabulary. ...
... In terms of lexical coverage, prior research on TED talks and academic lectures suggests that TED talks are comparable to lectures in terms of general vocabulary (Dang & Webb, 2014;Nurmukhamedov, 2017) and less demanding than lectures in terms of academic vocabulary (Coxhead & Walls, 2012;Wingrove, 2017). Starting with general vocabulary, lexical coverage has often been measured using frequency bands comprised of 1000 word families each, which gain decreasing coverage across texts as further bands are added. ...
... When the word family version of the AVL was measured across written academic corpora, it reached approximately 14% coverage in a number of studies (Gardner & Davies, 2014;Goulart, 2018;Newman, 2016) and the lemmatised version reached 16.82% coverage across the BAWE corpus (Durrant, 2016). Further, as mentioned in the introduction, the (lemmatised) AVL covered 6.56% of TED talks on average, compared to 9.35% of academic lectures (Wingrove, 2017). However, this study was limited to only 49 TED talks and 3 topic tags (Technology, Entertainment, and Design), compared to 2,483 talks and 400þ topic tags in the current study. ...
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 all cases Mann–Whitney U tests found lectures had significantly higher coverage, with small effect sizes for lexis. This difference was smaller for academic tagged TED talks (n = 1379). When like-for-like disciplines were compared, lectures typically had greater coverage than their TED talk counterparts. An analysis of the cumulative coverage of types demonstrated a lower representation of the less frequent academic types in TED talks. A combined ratio and minimum frequency measure identified academic types which distinguish the genres. Pedagogical implications are discussed.
... Also, its expansion has allowed other languages to be used, which accommodates audience members with different first languages (TED, n.d.-b). TED Talks, which have a maximum length of 18 minutes, have been increasingly shown in English language classrooms across nations since they are authentic, informative, and resourceful (Chase et al., 2015;Elk, 2014;Takaesu, 2014;Watkins & Wilkins, 2011;Wingrove, 2017). Therefore, there is no doubt that TED Talks are an appropriate resource in English language classrooms. ...
... With the intervention, our students enjoyed many forms of experiential learning, which built upon their prior knowledge of language and culture, so as to formulate new sources of linguistic and cultural knowledge. Standing in the position of learning with open-mindedness and flexibility, our students were expected to familiarise themselves with new sets of cultural norms, rules, and regulations informed by their TED Talks speakers, instructor, and class colleagues (Chase et al., 2015;Elk, 2014;Wingrove, 2017). This sense of familiarity profoundly impacted their identification, acknowledgement, and clarification of cultural differences which necessarily exist among people in society and among communities. ...
In this study, we sought to measure specific changes in Vietnamese higher education students’ intercultural communicative competence, drawn from the theoretical frameworks of intercultural communicative competence and student engagement. By adopting a concurrent mixed-method approach, this study aims to generate a fresh insight into how Vietnamese college students can learn English by engaging in TED Talks to support their acquisition of intercultural experiences. Findings showed changes in the student participants’ levels of engagement in intercultural communicative competence, both cognitively and behaviourally. For the purpose of filling missing literature and providing pedagogical implications, this publication also proposes future research avenues in order to fill literature gaps and discover further pedagogical implications.
... Due to the inclusion of academic content, a number of studies have approached TED from an English for academic purposes (EAP) perspective, noting their pedagogic potential. For instance, academic listening research has been conducted on TED talks (Abdulrahman 2017;Elk 2014;Takaesu 2014) and, in order to investigate their suitability as learning materials, the coverage of general English vocabulary (Nurmukhamedov 2017) and academic vocabulary (Wingrove 2017) has been measured. These studies found that TED talks require a wider range of vocabulary for comprehension, closer to the average written text, rather than the average spoken text (Nurmukhamedov 2017) and that TED talks have lower academic vocabulary coverage compared to academic lectures, although with notable overlap (Wingrove 2017). ...
... For instance, academic listening research has been conducted on TED talks (Abdulrahman 2017;Elk 2014;Takaesu 2014) and, in order to investigate their suitability as learning materials, the coverage of general English vocabulary (Nurmukhamedov 2017) and academic vocabulary (Wingrove 2017) has been measured. These studies found that TED talks require a wider range of vocabulary for comprehension, closer to the average written text, rather than the average spoken text (Nurmukhamedov 2017) and that TED talks have lower academic vocabulary coverage compared to academic lectures, although with notable overlap (Wingrove 2017). ...
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 oriented versus object-oriented discourse’, iv. ‘Subjective perspectives’, v. ‘Persuasive stance’, vi. ‘Expert elaboration’, and vii. ‘Change and inspiration’. When the model was compared to prior research, similarity with MD models based in academic texts was observed. However, some dimensions were found to be indicative of the unique nature of TED talks, such as expert elaboration and change and inspiration. When the EFA model was mapped onto the TED corpus’s subcorpora (defined by topic tags), individual disciplines were characterised in terms of the dimensions and some traditional academic groups were observed.
... Moreover, the TED presenter can make some language mistakes. This also can teach learners how to speak fearlessly (Wingrove, 2017). Additionally, Maria et al. (2018) mentioned that "Ted is a useful in an academic context given the features of the platform and its content; besides that, Ted becomes an excellent pedagogical tool thanks to its ability to inspire, and amaze the audience". ...
... Therefore, there is an increasing interest in TED more than the other video platforms. Given the different educational potentialities of TED Talks, TED has initiated some partnerships with other pertinent companies, such as NatGeo, and thus has developed its own platform that is specially designed for educational purposes (Saunders, 2017;Wingrove, 2017). ...
... The audiovisual materials took the form of a presentation led by a speaker to the audience (e.g., from the TED website [28]) or a 'radio' program discussing a phenomenon or event. The materials always contained key thoughts and specialized vocabulary that should be learned. ...
... The talks are addressed online and typically range from ten to twenty minutes. TED talks are translated into over a hundred world languages and have over a billion views (Wingrove, 2017). The term feminism is mostly misperceived. ...
This research paper examines the complex interplay between language, feminism and social expectations through the sociolinguistic analysis of “TED talk ‘We Should All Be Feminists’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,” taken as a sample. The dialogues used in the talk were transcribed. The study explores the use of the Nigerian English dialect in Adichie’s talk, highlighting its cultural authenticity and the effect of language on propagating feminist ideals. Through descriptive and qualitative methodology, the study challenges conventional gender norms expressed in the speech, shedding light on social variables such as language use, culture, power dynamics and gender inequality. Besides this, the paper focuses on reshaping social expectations and abandoning gender discrimination. It contributes significant insights into gender studies and linguistics, underscoring the vitality of language in social progress and in shaping feminist discourse. Hence, comprehending the power of language to shape perspectives enables one to foster inclusivity and challenge biases. Therefore, this study is crucial for advocating social change and empowering individuals to reshape and challenge entrenched gender norms. Overall, this research highlights universal issues of social justice and gender stereotypes. It ensures solidarity in the struggle for gender equality globally by examining the intersection of feminism, language and culture.
... The content of the videos provide students exposure to authentic material and introduce them to the topic through a range of vocabulary pertaining to the topic. TED talks have been known to be an extensive listening resource for EAP students and a number of studies have revealed that oral presentation skills and vocabulary uptake/retention levels were improved due to the use of TED talks as an ICT tool (Salem, 2019;Takaesu, 2017;Abd Aziz and Ngadiron, 2019;Maria et al., 2018;Wingrove, 2017;Abdulrahman, 2018;Siegel, 2019;Paliath and Dhinakar, 2021;Astika and Kurniawan, 2020;Karunakar;Leopold, 2016;Garcia-Pinar, 2019;Rudneva, 2023). The advantage of using TED talks for this specific course is that www.tedmed.com ...
The need for enhancing English proficiency is one of most significant issues tackled daily by many medical students in EFL contexts across the world. In the ESP context, the teacher has numerous roles in order to fulfill the needs of the learners, including that of a needs analyst, syllabus designer, material developer, practitioner, evaluator, and is also in charge of setting goals and objectives for the course. While ESP learners are more enthusiastic and demanding in their specialized field, it is essential to consider their opinions and set their needs first when developing material. Interests, target and proficiency levels of ESP learners usually differ, therefore, ESP material should be tailored to meet the needs of such an audience. With the rising need for more adequate content and a more efficient textbook for the Medical English II course at Iran University of Medical Sciences, this case study follows the process of developing an ESP course book for this means. Key elements of material development in the ESP context are put forth, followed by selection of content, developing exercises and activities, pilot testing the book and getting feedback from students and ESP experts, revising and implementing changes, and finally the outcome of such an endeavor. The results of this study can be beneficial on a global scale, for students in the field of medicine, instructors on the lookout for appropriate teaching content, and practitioners in the realm of material development.
... Over time, the talks have become highly influential digital materials used in diverse educational settings and have increasingly been explored for their potential as a pedagogical resource (cf. e.g., Carney, 2014;Chang & Huang, 2015;Dummett et al., 2016;García-Pinar, 2019a, 2019bGarcía-Pinar & Pallejá-López, 2018;Takaesu, 2013;Wingrove, 2017). Numerous studies have been conducted to identify the typical linguistic, and more recently, multimodal features underpinning the rhetoric of promoting 'ideas worth spreading' specified in their motto. ...
... This is especially true for the ESP/EAP instruction, because of significant lack of graded pedagogic materials that could be offered to the learners of lower proficiency levels who might lack vocabulary range as well as listening comprehension skill to appreciate unabridged professional contexts. Thus past research indicates numerous attempts to integrate TTs-based listening comprehension tasks into the syllabi of general English courses (Wu, 2020), (Puspita et al, 2020), (Saputra et al, 2018), (Al-Jarf, 2021), (Tilwani et al, 2022), (Mojgan et al, 2019), EAP courses (Madarbakus, 2021), (Abdulrahman, 2017), (Wingrove, 2017), (Takaesu, 2017) and ESP courses (Rudneva et al, 2019), (García-Pinar, 2019), (Humeniuk et al, 2021), (Kekelidze et al, 2021). ...
The study aims at investigating incorporation of TED talks (TTs) in ESP classes with a specific focus on abundant opportunities TTs provide for teaching intensive and extensive listening. Although the importance of listening comprehension is widely admitted, a few scholars still claim that it remains the most neglected micro-skill of all, a "Cinderella of communication strategies". This misbalance can be partly put down to lack of graded listening materials of appealing content for lower proficiency students and TTs might serve as a potential remedy for ESP learners. The nature of TTs (with TED standing for Technology, Entertainment and Design) is of great interest for learners due to engaging topics, motivating speakers, easy access and overall user friendliness. Therefore a few SLA instructors have been attempting to utilize TTs in various ways, which include, but are not limited to vocabulary development and retention, listening comprehension, translation skills, speaking assignments varying from guided discussions to oral presentations, reading comprehension skills, writing and summation, EAP, etc. A few integration models have been suggested and evaluated in past literature. The author attempts to draw on those and suggest a detailed account of advances that refer to teaching extensive and intensive listening comprehension.
... Peter Wingrove (2017) studied the suitability of TED Talks for academic listening. He used a corpus of 49 TED Talks and found that they contained a similar level of academic vocabulary as university lectures, which made them suitable for academic listening. ...
With a view to advancing their students’ listening comprehension and vocabulary, English for Science teachers are frequently in search of new and interesting audio and video materials. TED Talks on science topics are a good option for this purpose. But just how suitable, vocabulary-wise, are they for English for Science learners? This study explores the lexical profile of TED Talks on science and compares it against non-science TED Talks and science academic lectures. We use a 5-million-word TED Talk corpus, with a 1.3-million-word science subsection. Of the two categories of TED Talks, it is the science ones that are lexically more similar to science academic lectures. Science TED Talks also feature significantly more technical vocabulary than non-science TED Talks. Reasonable listening comprehension is achieved at 4,000 words for science TED Talks, while ideal comprehension is achieved at 8,000 words for both categories. These results recommend science TED Talks for English for Science listening.
... TED talks have been analyzed in the literature to determine the way speakers use verbs or pronouns (Caliendo and Compagnone, 2014, Compagnone, 2015, or ideas, considering the number of times the word idea(s) is mentioned, together with the macro discourse markers that are used in the presentations (Uicheng and Crabtree, 2018;Shanti and Probowati, 2021), or the way speakers address large audiences to 1 seduce them (Valeiras-Jurado et al., 2018;Virtanen and Halmari, 2005). A different perspective is that used by Wingrove (2017), who explores the use of TED talks for oral practice in the FL English language classroom. ...
TED talks are a relatively new genre, in which experts in different fields share their knowledge, ideas and experiences to large audiences. The talks are broadcasted worldwide, thus reaching international and intercultural spectators. Although public spoken language has been extensively studied in literature, TED talks present a new field of study, and are considered as a hybrid genre. It has been argued that, although similar in some ways, they differ from other oral discourse types, such as university lectures, in many aspects, such as the epistemic stance, the presentation of ideas, or the macro-discourse markers used (Caliendo and Compagnone, 2014). The utilization of emotion for triggering audience response is the foundation of the present study, aimed at examining the way speakers use emotions to involve spectators in their monologues, and exploring other strategies exploited to spark feedback, so that the most successful ones can be identified. The paper discusses the analysis of 120 TED talks from two different topics, business and education, taking a basic list of emotion words as a starting point, to continue examining how these emotion words and audiences intermingle by looking into laughter and applause, as the two identified forms of feedback. Results indicate that no significant differences can be found in the two subcorpora analyzed in terms of emotion words, the use of multiple humor strategies, and the acknowledgment of multicultural audiences on the side of the speakers.
... Eliciting students' output based on listening materials is often used as an effective method to evaluate both their listening and spoken proficiencies (Yeldham 2016). TED talks are similar to university lectures and conference presentations and therefore belong to the realm of one-way academic listening (Lynch 2011), despite the fact that TED talks are delivered at a faster speed and contain less academic vocabulary than university lectures (Wingrove 2017). The Ted talk utilized in this study focuses on how to improve critical thinking capabilities. ...
The inherent complexity of listening activities poses considerable challenges to second language listeners. For decades, researchers have been exploring effective strategies to help improve L2 learners’ listening proficiency. Note-taking, which is frequently and strategically employed to complete listening tasks and to learn content, has also been examined extensively from various perspectives. However, it seems that little is known about the effect of L2 learners’ linguistic choices in note-taking on their listening performance. Employing pedagogical translanguaging as an analytical lens, the current research sets out to investigate whether or not L2 learners’ multilingual notes, compared to monolingual notes, significantly enhance their performance in academic listening activities. Conducted in a Chinese university EFL context, this study adopts a mixed-methods approach. A total of 90 participants were assigned to three groups and were asked to take notes in Chinese, English, and a combination of all languages, symbols, drawings, etc., respectively. Data were collected from the results of two listening tasks (a listening comprehension test and a retelling task), a questionnaire survey designed to focus on their attitudes to the linguistic choices they made in note-taking, and the multilingual notes taken. The findings revealed that students who were allowed to make full use of their linguistic and semiotic resources in note-taking were able to perform significantly better in both listening tasks. The same group of students also demonstrated a diverse and flexible mobilization of their multilingual and multimodal assets in the notes they took. This study provides evidence for applying pedagogical translanguaging as an effective approach in designing note-taking instructions. It is suggested that L2 learners should be encouraged to deploy their entire linguistic repertoire when taking notes during listening activities, which could lead to improved performance.
... The English corpus (working title: Corpus of Spoken Academic English (CSAE)) was assembled using two comparatively small existing resources (the aforementioned British Academic Spoken English corpus (BASE) and the Open Yale courses lecture corpus (Wingrove, 2017)) and a large, purpose-built corpus consisting of automatically generated transcripts based on YouTube educational videos, including many lecture series (for excerpts from the metadata, see the Appendix). Seed words such as university education, higher education, lecture, etc. were used to identify relevant material. ...
This article takes a doubly contrastive approach to spoken academic language. On the one hand, it explores genre differences between spoken and written academic English and French; on the other, it considers divergences between spoken academic discourse in the two languages. The corpora used for this purpose were purpose-built on the basis of YouTube video subtitles and other sources. The focus of attention is on keywords and key metadiscursive routines. The results suggest that, somewhat counterintuitively, the distance between academic speech and writing is smaller in French than it is in English, so that written routines can be more easily transferred to speech in French. French written and spoken discourse shows a greater degree of abstraction and self-referentiality than is the case in English. The article selectively illustrates that both French and English have a distinct set of spoken routines that are not used in writing; these need to be described and recorded in lexicographic resources to make them available for teachers and learners.
... The study of Wingrove [9] showed that TED lectures have approximately 25 per cent less academic vocabulary than an academic discourse at a university in general. Additionally, he found out that there are many talks, which have even more academic vocabulary. ...
Learning a foreign language is more considered on productive skills such as speaking and writing, but also listening and reading are essential as they provide crucial input to learners. Listening is a typical activity with a great deal of oral exposure to a language. Therefore, extensive listening (EL) is helpful in a way that the learners engage with a variety of comprehensible input. This qualitative method study investigated whether there is a relationship between students’ listening achievements and the use of TED lectures as an extensive listening resource in the classroom. Moreover, this study explored the students’ perceptions of the use of TED lectures as EL materials in the treatment period. To shed light on these issues, 20 school students, who learned English as a foreign language participated in this study. The results also indicated that students found extensive listening enjoyable and useful to learn new vocabulary. Moreover, they expressed that the subtitles make the speech more comprehensible for the parts that were challenging to comprehend.
... Presenters in these talks come from various fields, and discussions range from science, design, technology, entertainment, and business, to global issues. The TED Talks corpus has been used in previous research on several topics such as resources for best practices in teaching [75], commenting behavior [76], academic listening exercises [77,78], and speech recognition [79]. In humor research, TED Talks are more used for building automatic humor recognition algorithms [25,26]. ...
Humor is applied in pedagogy to create a positive learning environment. Recent research focuses on the theories, effects, individual differences, and qualitative aspects of humor for instruction. However, there is a lack of studies focusing on quantitative features. Therefore, this research explored the quantitative characteristics of instructional humor in a naturalistic setting and applied techniques from natural language processing (NLP). This paper describes the results of two studies. The first study focused on instructional humor frequency and the placement of humor, while the linguistic features of instructional humor and non-instructional humor were compared in the second study. Two corpora were used in this research: TED Talks and user-submitted jokes from “stupidstuff.org” The results found that educators used humor 12.92 times for popular talks, while less popular talks only had 3.92 times. Humor is also more commonly placed during the first parts of the talk and lessens toward the end. There were also significant differences between the linguistic features of instructional and non-instructional humor in terms of readability scores and sentiment. These results provide a substantial update on quantitative instructional humor research and help educators understand how to use humor in the classroom in terms of quantitative and linguistic features.
... They are a distinct type of presentation, and arguably an emergent genre in their own right; one which blends "the sales pitch, the memoir, and the academic lecture" (Ludewig, 2017, p.1). Compared with traditional university lectures, TED talks have been shown to have lower Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) representation (Wingrove, 2017). This pseudo-academic tenor helps to make academic topics accessible and appealing, and several coursebooks 1 adapt TED talks and promote them in the EAP context as an authentic means of providing listening input while developing critical thinking skills needed to engage with current, real-world discussion topics. ...
The use of TED talks in EAP has gained popularity in recent years and they are promoted through coursebooks as a means of simultaneously developing listening and critical thinking skills. However, a traditional comprehension approach to teaching listening; one that focuses on testing lower-order thinking skills through discrete questions may be inadequate as a gateway into a critical consideration of broader issues for second language learners. With the practical purpose of developing a teaching approach to using TED talks informed by current theory, the chapter begins with a consideration of how critical thinking processes and top-down and bottom-up listening processes can be integrated into a singular model. Based on this framework, a genre analysis of the TED talk is made by taking a learner’s perspective in order to identify cognitive and affective barriers to listening that may restrict opportunities for critical thinking. In the discussion that follows, five activities are suggested for use with TED talks in listening classes that support top-down and bottom-up listening processes, and which set students up to analyse and evaluate the thesis and underlying structure of a TED talk, providing a solid foundation from which to approach discussion topics critically and reflectively.
... I chose TED presentations as the source for academic input for a number of reasons. First, TED Talks have been shown to be a source of academic spoken language that is reflective of the genre in authentic academic settings (Wingrove, 2017). Second, the format of TED Talks is such that even though the topics are discipline-specific, the mode of delivery is usually devised to appeal to even non-specialists. ...
A considerable amount of research on formulaic language has been devoted to compiling lists of lexical patterns frequently used in various forms of discourse (e.g., Simpson-Vlach & Ellis, 2010). Such lists are based on the premise that learning common core features of a particular register, such as academic writing, would contribute to gaining control of the type of discourse commonly used in that register. However, registers are often characterized by certain variables (e.g., text type), which can give rise to internal communicative variation within them. This raises the question of whether the items included in general service lists are versatile enough to account for internal variability within registers. The present study set out to address this question by examining whether, and to what extent, the Academic Formulas List (AFL) (Simpson-Vlach & Ellis, 2010) holds up to its promise as an all-purpose list for EAP and writing in tertiary education. In doing so, the BAWE corpus was employed as a representative collection of university student writing. Computer programs were then developed to calculate the frequency of occurrence of AFL items in assignments in BAWE. Following this, mixed-effects modelling was used to examine the extent to which the use of AFL items in university student assignments remains consistent across different disciplinary domains and assignment types, and whether the use of these items develops as students progress through their university education. Mixed-effects models were used because of their flexibility in addressing unbalanced data designs (such as that of BAWE) and handling individual variation between students in writing their university assignments. The patterns that emerged from our analyses provide evidence that the substantial variation in the extent to which students from different academic domains draw on such resources as the AFL undermines the assumption that teaching common core features of academic writing can be equally useful for all students engaged in tertiary education.
... Another example of the professor as a screen star is the TED talk. A review by Wingrove (2017) tells us that TED talks have been viewed by over 1 billion people globally and some of the most popular talks have received nearly 20 million views each. So, what can we learn from the TED talk experience? ...
This paper looks back at the last 20 or so years of research into using video in education and seeks to see what it tells us about creating video to support learning. The exploration is literature-based and involves a critical discussion of articles on video-based learning and related pedagogical principles and methodologies. Literature chiefly focuses on the principles and characteristics of video that help to transmit and wrap the learning content in a way that will call the learner's attention. Few of the discussed articles attend to learning as the transformation of information per se. Nor do they speak to a clearer pedagogy for video. The scholarly inquiry into the pedagogy within the video, a certain pedagogical style and design of the video necessary to support and thus lead to learning, is lacking. Therefore, the explanatory power of the instructional video and the elements that enable a more transformative learning pedagogy for video are to be yet identified. The video format proves to be effective when compared to other forms of presentation. However, the effectiveness of a learning video is not due to the format itself, but to the principles of its judicious use. This study seeks to advance this premise and insists that transformation in learning is possible through a successful video experience. Upholding this presumption should encourage instructional designers and lecturers to make good the pedagogical principles rather than searching for unending technology and production techniques in order to design an effective learning video and employ its affordances to good ad-vantage. Since creating videos for learning purposes largely adopts a transmission of knowledge approach, this paper discusses the results of a literature review that supports the transmission styles of learning. However, additionally, it explores the literature to identify the elements that enable a more transformative learning pedagogy for video. As a consequence, the tension be-tween the two approaches has been revealed. These discrepancies emphasise the urge for clarification to help research into videobased learning move forward and make headway towards a more efficient learning experience.
... It should be noted, however, that scenarios in lectures have particular characteristics, and the same search queries used with other types of corpora may not yield examples that are useful for lecturer training. For example although TED talks are sometimes used as a substitute for lectures in EAP contexts (Wingrove 2017), and although the TED Corpus (Hasebe 2015) contains many scenarios in the same fantastic vein as those we have identified for this study, there are fundamental differences between most lecture scenarios and most TED talk scenarios. The mission of the TED organisation is to spread ideas across communities, and it claims to "believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and, ultimately, the world" (www.ted.com). ...
A number of studies have examined the occurrence of stories in lecture contexts, and have suggested that stories can encourage student engagement and the acquisition and retention of lecture information content. Some of these studies have analysed story structures in terms of Labov and Waletzky’s model (1967) or the more elaborate model developed by Martin (2008). Such models work well for stories that recount events that took place in past time, but they do not capture another type of story, the hypothetical scenario, sufficiently well. Drawing on prior research into stories in lecture discourse, and ‘Imagining Scenarios’ (Ädel 2010, 2012), we identify and describe passages in lectures where listeners are invited to imagine a fantastic hypothetical situation. Scenario identification criteria were developed, and examples were extracted from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus, the Engineering Lecture Corpus (ELC), and the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). Novice EMI lecturers may understandably be nervous about straying away from the delivery of facts and into the realms of fantasy, but our findings suggest that scenario-telling is part of the experienced lecturer’s repertoire, and is an engaging way of elaborating abstract technical terms, concepts, or arguments central to a disciplinary topic.
... This makes TED become one excellent tool in ELT classroom since this not only allows students to interact directly with spoken English but also get a perspective from the side of people with expertise in the particular area. Wingrove (2017) in his study, reveals that TED is useful in an academic context given the features of the platform and its content, hence it is regarded as an excellent pedagogical tool. Distinguishing from some other digital videos that were not designed for teaching purposes, TED offers users the possibility to see the subtitles and transcription. ...
... Covering a great variety of topics from science to business to global issues, TED talks have been highly recommended for use in class and out of class in a range of ways, including the training of academic listening and oral presentation as well as academic spoken vocabulary development (Chang & Huang, 2015;Liu & Chen, 2019;Takaesu, 2013;Wingrove, 2017). Schmidt (2018) enumerated several examples of how TED talks have pedagogical potential for students beyond the inspiring content per se that can be gained from listening to them. ...
Schmitt and Schmitt (2014) labeled the first 4000 to 9000 word families as mid-frequency words and stressed their importance based on Nation's (2006) estimate that for adequate comprehension of a variety of authentic texts, knowledge of the first 9000 word families is necessary. Subsequent to this vocabulary goal is to determine what can be read extensively to increase vocabulary progressively since most words cannot be mastered through only one exposure. This research aimed to investigate how much TED talk transcripts input is needed to encounter most of the first 9000 word families for learning to occur. It first measured the vocabulary levels of TED talks for their potential as extensive reading material for mid-frequency word learning. The results show that TED talks reached the 5th to 6th 1000-word-family level at 98% lexical coverage. Corpus sizes of 0.3 to 4.8 million words of TED transcripts provided an average of 12+ repetitions for most of the words from the first 4th to 9th 1000 word families. The figures may serve as a reference for learners in extensive reading programs to decide how much effort they should make to read TED talk transcripts voluminously to reach a certain vocabulary goal.
Non-native English-speaking postgraduate students, especially those with Chinese as the first language (L1), suffer particularly from difficulties with academic English speaking. This chapter showcases the 12-week Speaking Clinics, an innovative speaking support offering open to all XJTLU master’s students. In a 50-minute session every week, students engage in multiple rounds of discussions related to a selected TED Talk, the presentation skills used by the speaker, and reflections on their use of discussion strategies. Feedback from students shows that the Speaking Clinics were highly valued as opportunities to practise speaking skills outside class and that TED Talks were a helpful tool integrated into the design and delivery of the Speaking Clinics. Notably, a comfortable and relaxing atmosphere facilitated by teachers was underscored by both survey respondents and focus group participants. Overall, survey respondents reported perceived improvements in language proficiencies and affective effects. Among them, improvement in critical thinking skills, abilities to engage in discussions, and listening comprehension was highly evaluated. The positive feedback from students echoes recommended practices from literature on developing academic discussion skills and supports learning values of TED Talks as educational resources to boost learner motivation and autonomy.
Бұл мақалада шетелдік анимациялық фильмдердің қазақ тілінде сапалы дыбысталу мәселесі және дыбыстамадағы стилистикалық ерекшеліктер қарастырылады. Мақала қалың бұқара бірдей назар аудармайтын халықтың арнаулы бөлігіне, яғни балалар мен жасөспірімдерге ғана арналатын анимациялық фильмдердің қазіргі көрінісіне, аударма кезінде жіберілетін стилистикалық қателер мен ұтымды тұстарына, кемшіліктерге назар аударту, тілдік қолданыстың функционалдық қызметін тиісті деңгейде жүзеге асырудың жолдарын қарастыру мақсатын көздейді. Сонымен қатар мақалада дубляж саласының ерекшелігі, қазақша дубляждалған мультфильмдердің сапалы тілдік қолданысына баға беріледі. Көрермендердің жас ерекшелігіне байланысты аударма тілінің қолданылуы, көрермен аудиториясына әсері сөз болады. Мақалада қазақ тілінде дубляждалған Disney студиясымен шығарылған «Ральф интернетке қарсы» (2018), «Мұзды өлке 2» (2019), «Pixar» кинокомпаниясының «Лука» (2021) анимациялық мультфильміндегі стильдік ерекшеліктер талданып, эмоционалды-экспрессивті реңктің аударма барысында тиімді қолданысы көрсетіледі. Мақалада тілдік бірліктердің сюжетке сәйкес, мағыналық, прагматикалық өзгеріске ұшырап, уәжді, уәжсіз ауытқу формалары, стереотип, диалект пен сленг сөздердің қолданыс табуы қарастырылған. Кейіпкер тілінде кездесетін тіркестер мысал ретінде түпнұсқа - ағылшын тілінде, орыс тілінде, қазақ тілінде үш түрлі нұсқада берілді. Кейіпкер тілінің ұлттық танымдық және лингвомәдени лексикасы талданып, прагмастилистикалық ерекшеліктері сараланады. Мақаладағы басты теориялық база ретінде стилистика, аударматану, диалектология, өнертану ғылымдарының алдыңғы қатардағы зерттеулері, Қазақстан Республикасының «Кинематография туралы» Заңы басшылыққа алынады. Тірек сөздер: кинематография, дубляж, аударма ісі, стилистика, стереотип, диалект, таным, лингвомәдениет.
This study presents a multidimensional analysis (MF/MD) to explore the register features of English TED talks and the sub-register variation based on different topics. The results show that TED talks are highly involved and non-narrative with explicit references. They display varying degrees of overt persuasiveness, and information produced throughout the talks is non-abstract and elaborated online. Across those sub-registers, Art and Design talks perform weakly in explicit references, overt persuasion, and online information elaboration. Business talks are overtly persuasive and well elaborated online. Education and Culture talks include more narratives than other categories and represent the most persuasive talks with the least abstract information. Talks on Politics and Global Issues show the most explicit references. Science and Technology talks present the most elaborated online performance but are weak in narratives, explicit references and overt persuasion. 28 lexico-grammatical features from the total 67 across the five categories demonstrate significant differences, reflecting the distinguishing features between sub-registers to a certain extent. The results reveal the general register features of English TED talks, contributing to research on spoken science popularizing discourse, and having pedagogical implications for EFL/ESP and teaching across diverse disciplines and professions.
TED talks and TED-Ed animations have been widely used in English language courses to facilitate the learning of general and general academic English. However, little is known about their potential as resources for learning specific academic English. This study helps to fill this gap by examining, from a lexical perspective, their potential as learning materials for English for science and technology (EST). Specifically, it analyzes specialized vocabulary in two corpora, one of science and technology TED talks and the other, of science and technology TED-Ed animations. The results show that, given their high coverage of specialized vocabulary (comparable to that of science lectures), both these types of material may be useful in EST instruction. In particular, the TED talks may serve as bridging materials for EST beginners, while the TED-Ed animations may be more suitable for familiarizing students with specialized words that are infrequent in general English. Also, because TED-Ed animations are comparable to written science texts in terms of their coverage of specialized vocabulary, they may be especially useful as materials for EST vocabulary learning.
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) provide rich academic content to learners around the world. However, understanding such content is challenging to second-language learners. Given the importance of vocabulary knowledge to comprehension, this study constructed a 10.2-million-word corpus of MOOCs from four disciplinary areas (engineering, humanities and arts, science and math, and social sciences), and examined (a) the lexical demands of MOOCs, (b) the coverage of general and discipline-specific academic vocabulary lists in MOOCs, and (c) the extent to which these lists helped learners with MOOCs' lexical demands. The results show that – together with proper nouns, marginal words, transparent compounds, and acronyms – the most frequent 3,000 and 4,000 word families of general English respectively provide 90% and 95% coverage of the corpus, indicating that MOOCs are as lexically challenging as university lectures. Also, because both general and discipline-specific academic vocabulary lists provide high coverage of MOOCs, studying them can lower students' learning burdens and help them achieve higher coverage of MOOCs than learning words by frequency. Lastly, based on learners’ existing vocabulary knowledge and target disciplines, this study provides pedagogical recommendations to teachers on how to employ general and discipline-specific academic word lists as vocabulary support for EAP students.
Amid increasing demand for EAP courses, there is a pressing need to identify suitable materials for EAP instruction. This study examines the suitability of TED-Ed animations for academic listening by exploring the lexical demands, academic vocabulary coverage, lexical density, and speech rates of a corpus of 1,319 such animations covering 12 subject areas. The results show that knowledge of the most frequent 3,000–5,000 word families is necessary to follow TED-Ed animations reasonably well, meaning that they are lexically more demanding than academic lectures. The animations were also found to have a coverage of lower-frequency academic words comparable to that of academic lectures, making the former a potentially important resource in which EAP students can encounter important academic words that are seldom used in general English. Moreover, the speech rate of TED-Ed animations is comparable to that of academic lectures, but they are lexically denser, suggesting that – while they may be useful for familiarizing learners with the delivery pace of academic lectures – additional vocabulary support may be needed. Overall, these results support the use of TED-Ed animations as materials for academic listening, but adequate scaffolding and some adjustments will be needed if they are to be integrated effectively into EAP instruction.
As an important part of interpersonal communication, stance adverbs are used to express the speakers’ opinions, attitudes and style of delivery. However, stance adverbs in spoken registers have not received enough attention. This study analyzed the stance adverbs in TED scientific talks, with a particular focus on the most common certainty stance adverb really. This research is based on a self-built corpus composed of 80 TED talks in science and technology categories from 2017 to 2022, with a total number of 161,523 words. The findings indicated that epistemic stance adverbs, particularly certainty adverbs, were the most frequently employed category. The results also revealed that speakers of TED scientific talks tended to adopt really in the medial position in the clause. Meanwhile, really was mainly used to emphasize and express factual truth. The purpose of this study is to complement the existing research on stance adverbs in the spoken registers and provide suggestions for public speaking in academic discourse.
Online learning has gained increasing attention during the COVID-19 pandemic. Teachers face social exigencies to design ways of knowledge dissemination in online instruction. We posit that understanding how knowledge can be represented in successful online academic genres can inform teachers on how they can design students’ online learning experiences. This study examined how scientific knowledge is disseminated in one of the most widespread academic genres, TED Talks, which share discoursal similarities with other academic genres such as online lectures. This study adopted a systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis approach to explore how a presenter used speech, images, and gestures to disseminate knowledge. The analysis shows that a presenter orchestrates speech, images, and gestures strategically to clarify the scientific ideas and engage the audience. Based on understanding how the three semiotic modes are used to disseminate scientific knowledge in accessible and engaging ways, this paper discusses how insights on multimodal orchestration can function as a heuristic tool to inform design in online learning.
Vocabulary is now well recognized as an important focus in language teaching and learning. Now in its third edition, this book provides an engaging, authoritative guide to the teaching and learning of vocabulary in another language. It contains descriptions of numerous vocabulary learning strategies, which are supported by reference to experimental research, case studies, and teaching experience. It also describes what vocabulary learners need to know to be effective language users. This new edition has been updated to incorporate the wealth of research that has come out of the past decade. It also includes a new chapter on out of-classroom learning, which explores the effect of the Internet and electronic resources on learning. This vital resource for all vocabulary researchers shows that by taking a systematic approach to vocabulary learning, teachers can make the best use of class time and help learners get the best return for their learning effort.
Este capítulo tiene como objetivo contribuir con una iniciativa para el fortalecimiento de la competencia investigativa en el perfil profesional de los docentes de inglés como lengua extranjera de educación primaria y secundaria de Ecuador. Se realiza una revisión cronológica de la política educativa del país (2012-2020) con relación al fomento del desarrollo de investigaciones por parte de los docentes de inglés y se plantea una propuesta que contribuiría con la implementación de las citadas políticas. La propuesta se fundamenta en metodologías como la Investigación Acción Exploratoria y los modelos
colaborativos, que se vienen aplicando en contextos similares al ecuatoriano. Los resultados de esta investigación revelan varios esfuerzos del Ministerio de Educación por promover la práctica investigativa en su sistema, los cuales han sido expresados en sus políticas educativas. Sin embargo, a la fecha, también se evidencia la ausencia de procesos de formación para que los docentes logren estas metas. Se concluye ratificando la pertinencia de potenciar la competencia investigativa en el perfil profesional de los docentes de primaria y secundaria para contribuir en el mejoramiento de la educación de Ecuador y el cumplimiento de sus políticas educativas.
La enseñanza del idioma inglés (English as a Foreign Language, EFL) es relevante en el sistema educativo ecuatoriano, ya que es una lengua extranjera que se enseña actualmente desde educación básica hasta la universidad y cuenta con un plan de estudios definidos para cada sistema educativo. Según la Constitución del Ecuador los sistemas educativos deben estar articulados y, por ende, sus currículos; sin embargo, es preciso hacer un análisis minucioso para comprender la aplicación de los planes de estudios en cada nivel educativo y cómo las políticas educativas han influenciado para la toma de decisiones en
cada gobierno a partir de los años noventa. En el presente artículo de revisión sistemática de bibliografía, tanto el currículo del Ministerio de Educación como los planes de estudio serán analizados basándose en las reformas curriculares que se han dado a través de los años en el país. Con este análisis se pretende conocer si en realidad existe una articulación de los planes de estudio de la asignatura de Inglés como lengua extranjera, que en la mayor parte de instituciones públicas del país se enseña actualmente.
Selecting English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and English for Science and Technology (EST) listening materials is a challenging task as many different criteria could inform that choice. This study examines the suitability of science and technology documentaries for EAP and EST listening based on a corpus of 100 such documentaries. Departing from the premise that criteria such as thematic suitability, appeal and visual support for the vocabulary presented, as well as the fact that they are delivered in standard English, might recommend science and technology documentaries for this purpose, we further explore their lexical profile, lexical density and speech rate, so as to pass a more informed judgement in this regard. The results obtained are compared against those for academic lectures in general and science lectures in particular. They show that science and technology documentaries may be reasonably followed with a vocabulary size of 3,000 to 4,000 words, similar to what is required for lectures. Additionally, this genre is a good source of academic and technical vocabulary. Its higher lexical density is compensated by its slower delivery than that of lectures. Based on this, we support the inclusion of science and documentary films as EAP and EST materials.
Highlighting the importance of deictic expression studies in English language context, particularly in the form of speech, it is pivotal to explore further deixis as the specific area of pragmatics in order to enrich the theory as well as the practice of verbal communication development. Thus, the purpose of this descriptive qualitative study is to determine the presence of deixis in Lera Boroditsky’s speech of “how language changes the way we think?” and to decipher the meaning of each deictic statement in her speech. The data were obtained from a video of the TED Talks channel on YouTube. Then the transcript of the speech was analyzed and evaluated by using Levinson’s (1983) and Huang’s theories (2014). The results demonstrated that Lera Boroditsky’s speech has six categories of deixis: person deixis, spatial or place deixis, temporal or time deixis, social deixis, discourse deixis, and emotional deixis. Each deictic phrase has a distinct meaning depending on the context or situation presented in the speech. In other words, recognizing deixis in a formal speech helps understand the intention of speakers with different personalities, backgrounds, and cultures in several types of communication. In addition, some implications of the findings on the process of teaching and learning English language is also elaborated in this study.
The big data era of “data-driven schools, analysis, and change education” has arrived, and the technology of data mining was born in the education industry. Based on data mining technology, this study explores English listening prediction strategies and training approaches. Prediction is an effective learning strategy in listening comprehension. Cultivating students to use predictive strategies is helpful to improve their listening comprehension, mining and analyzing the listening data generated by English skill training system, selecting the data related to students’ listening as features, aiming at students’ test listening scores, carrying out model training, and realizing the prediction of students’ listening. After evaluation and analysis, it is found that data mining technology can be used to predict students’ listening more accurately.
Abstract While TED talks with their video format are popular teaching materials, limited corpus studies have been conducted to provide systematic evidence on their linguistic features. Further, hardly any of the existing research has examined the multi-word units of these talks, particularly phrasal verbs (PVs), a group of polysemous, high-frequency English lexical items. Following Liu and Myers’ approach (2020), this study characterized the most common meaning senses of 150 PVs (Garnier and Schmitt, Language Teaching Research, 19, 645–666, 2015) among 500 TED talk transcripts based on corpus analyses with their frequency information of meaning senses. Among the final 148 PV types identified in our TED corpus, 61 of them have one dominant meaning sense (over 80% incidents). With contrasting analyses of PV semantic information between the TED corpus and COCA sub-corpora, we found that PVs in the TED corpus are not similar to either the COCA spoken or academic writing register (contrasted in Liu and Myers). Then, a frequency-based TED PV list was compiled as a pedagogical reference to facilitate vocabulary learning via watching TED Talks. We suggest instructors to teach the 61 PVs first, then move to the others with more diversified meaning to alleviate students’ memory burden of learning these multi-word units.
OpenCourseWare (OCW) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have gained increasing popularity and importance because they greatly expand students’ access to university lectures. Although the main component of OCW and MOOC platforms is lectures, their differences may potentially affect the difficulty of academic listening comprehension. This study thus explores the extent to which the differences between OCW and MOOC lectures may affect L2 academic listening comprehension in terms of three affecting factors: academic vocabulary coverage, lexical density, and speech rate. The result shows that both OCW and MOOC lectures have a high academic vocabulary coverage, with many more higher-level academic words appearing in the current MOOC lectures. Moreover, the lexical density and speech rate of MOOC lectures are significantly higher than those of OCW lectures, suggesting that students may need to process denser information delivered at a faster speech rate when viewing MOOC lectures. It is thus concluded that comprehending MOOC lectures may demand higher-level academic listening skills and a larger academic vocabulary size. The findings can provide implications for EAP instruction in terms of using OCW and MOOC lectures as academic listening materials for students with different academic vocabulary knowledge and listening proficiency levels.
Lecture comprehension is a complex process that involves the decoding of meanings on various levels (e.g., phonological, lexical, syntactic, pragmatic, cultural), thus creating challenges for L2 learners. Moreover, there may be difficulties caused by unfamiliar prosodic patterns or accents of lecturers, as well as facial expressions and gesturing whose meanings may escape L2 students. To address all of these potential obstacles, lecture comprehension activities should implement materials prepared from authentic classroom lectures to provide L2 learners with realistic input, which may also vary according to instructional context.
The aim of this article is to illustrate how video-recorded lectures can be analysed to gain insights into their multifaceted nature and how the findings can be used to inform classroom activities to improve lecture comprehension. The article provides 1) a description of how video clips cut from OpenCourseWare lectures can be prepared for research and practice, 2) an overview of two case studies performed on video clips that highlight the use of multimodal ensembles integrating verbal and non-verbal features (e.g., idioms, humour, stance markers, culture-specific references, prosodic patterns, gesturing), and 3) a detailed lesson plan to exemplify how video clips from OCW lectures can be used to facilitate lecture comprehension.
This paper examines Scientific American's 60-Second Science podcasts from a genre perspective to identify structural and linguistic strategies for reformulating scientific discourse for diversified audiences. Move analysis of 110 representative texts revealed a dominant structural pattern consisting of an engaging Orientation, a foregrounded Claim followed by the establishment of its Credibility, the conventional Introduction-Methods-Results-Discussion, and a distinctive Termination often flavored with witty humor. This pattern contains the essential components of academic abstracts, research presentations, and science news reports. However, despite some overlapping moves, 60-Second Science differs from any of these similar genres in terms of communicative purposes, target audiences, move sequences, and even types of move signals. Apart from common linguistic devices used in typical academic genres, other notable move signals include topic shifters, rhetorical questions, and voice shifts between the podcasters and researchers. Meanwhile, weaving researchers' voices into the podcasters', frequent use of engagement devices such as inclusive pronouns, reader pronouns, self-mentions, questions, and hedges result in a highly dialogic and interactional style. These structural and linguistic features may make 60-Second Science podcasts an authentic listening resource suitable for EFL students to acquire a basic awareness of academic spoken discourse and strengthen the interface between general and academic English.
Building on research into the visual semiotics of slides and the multimodality of oral presentations, this paper analyses the speech-gesture-slide interplay in TED talks and considers implications for teaching about gesture in the academic presentation genre. Using two examples from presentations by award-winning science communicator Professor Brian Cox, an enactive-ecological approach to embodied communication yields fine-grained descriptions of relations between spoken language, visuals on the slide, and gesture including depictions, eye-gaze shifts, posture, and footwork. These demonstrate how the speaker's activity of showing slides is a person-environment dynamic of sense-making with the audience, and more specifically, how the speaker's speech-gesture-slide interplay animates, discloses, and decomposes aspects of the visuals on his slides while keeping his audience's attention intact. Whereas researchers of English for Academic Purposes have recommended raising students' awareness of multimodality or body language, this paper's findings suggest ways to sensitivise and engage students more directly and implicitly with the ecology of oral presentations.
This volume provides a concise overview of linguistic description in the field of English for Academic Purposes, charting its evolution and categorizing the various strands of research interest. Given the increasing use of English as a lingua franca, there has been a corresponding upsurge into research in EAP. The book synthesizes this research in one single volume and offers brief overviews on key terms and topics in EAP, including academic events and study genres, professional research genres and disciplinary discourses. This volume is key reading for graduate students new to the field as well as established researchers looking to expand their knowledge base in EAP. The work highlights the kinds of descriptions of academic English that have resulted from the research, which can be of interest to disciplinary teachers and lecturers, including those in English medium instruction.
This paper examines research findings concerning the density and speed of spoken discourse generally, in the light of evidence from the BASE corpus of authentic academic speech. A sample of lectures from this corpus is compared with texts used for lecture comprehension practice in EAP textbooks, and tentative conclusions are reached regarding the relationship between lecturing purpose and delivery style.
Speech rate is one of the most important elements in a news presentation, especially on radio, a sound medium. Accordingly, this study seeks to compare broadcasters' speech rate and the number of pauses in 40 news bulletins from the BBC (United Kingdom), Radio France (France), RAI (Italy), and RNE (Spain). Most authors addressing the medium of radio recommend a speech rate of between 160 and 180 words per minute (wpm). If this rate is considered, only one radio station, BBC, would be within the suitable limits. Instead, higher speeds and fewer pauses have been identified in the RAI and RNE bulletins. The second part of this study attempts to analyze whether perception in the news can be affected by different speech rates. The findings indicate that the extent to which the individuals surveyed experience subjective assessment varies according to the speech rate.
This paper presents findings of a study of recognition vocabulary knowledge as a predictor of written Academic English Proficiency (AEP) and overall Academic Achievement in an English medium higher education program in an English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) context. Vocabulary knowledge was measured using a Timed YES/NO (TYN) test. AEP was assessed using an academic writing test based on IELTS. Performance on these measures was correlated with Grade Point Average (GPA) as a measure of academic achievement for Arabic L1 users (N=70) at an English-medium College of Applied Sciences in the Sultanate of Oman. Vocabulary size and speed correlated with both academic writing and GPA measures. The combined vocabulary and writing measures were also examined as predictors of academic achievement. The TYN test is discussed as reliable, cost and time effective general measure of AEP and for showing if students have the necessary vocabulary knowledge to undertake study in a tertiary level English medium program.
The development of gender roles often begins as early as infancy. Being at the centre, gender manifests itself in any subtle and trivial aspect of our social life. From the time we are very small, it is ever present in any aspect of our life, in conversation, humor, conflict and so on. The overwhelming studies on the differences between men/women speech style represents the significance of the issue. The present study is an attempt to investigate whether the speaker's gender (being a male/female) contributes to the lexical density of their discourse. In other words, whether the lexical density of discourse is sensitive to the gender of the speaker? It is a data-driven, empirical study based on the transcribed recorded talk-in interactions between men and women. Text Content Analysis Tool (TCAT) was used to measure the lexical density of male/female speaker's discourse and to count the total number of words used by male/female speakers. The results of Chi-square test show that there is not a statistically significance difference between the lexical density of men and women discourse (p >0.157). However, there is a negative relationship between the lexical density of discourse and discourse length. In other words, the more word counts (689 words) the lower lexical density (0.33.67%) and vice versa the less word used by the speaker (31) the higher lexical density of the discourse (90.32%).
English is unquestionably the world language of academia – yet its most notable characteristic, being predominantly used by non-native speakers, has not seriously been taken on board in ESP descriptive studies. The project English as an academic lingua franca (ELFA) based at the University of Helsinki investigates academic discourses, branching out into two parts: one is the ELFA (English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings) corpus project, whose major achievement is the 1-million-word ELFA corpus of spoken academic discourse. The other part is SELF (Studying in English as a Lingua Franca), a project with a micro-analytic orientation, which aims at capturing participant experience of ELF in a university environment. This research note describes the rationale and the design of the ELFA corpus, and introduces recent research in the project.
Examines what percentage of coverage of text is needed for unassisted reading for pleasure, where learners are able to read without the interruption of looking up words. Looks at the effect of three densities of unknown vocabulary on two measures of reading comprehension, a multiple-choice test and a cued written recall test. (Author/VWL)
Interactive lectures play an important role in improving comprehension and in enhancing communicative competence in the English language for EFL university students taking content lecture courses. This article considers the interactive discourse in lectures of the English Studies Department at the University of Alicante, Spain. It describes an empirical study which set out to describe and compare textual and interpersonal discursive aspects (i.e., personal pronouns, discourse markers, questions and negotiation of meaning) of three non-interactive and three interactive lectures. The interactive lectures were found to be characterized by a greater amount of personal pronouns, elicitation markers, display and referential questions, as well as the presence of negotiation of meaning. The findings of the comparative analysis were used to promote interaction in originally non-interactive lectures. It was found that an increase in the use of the linguistic aspects analyzed were a product of interaction and not necessarily the cause of it.
This paper investigates the use of Academic Vocabulary List (D. Gardner & Davies, 2014) items in successful university study writing. Overall, levels of use of AVL items are high, and increase as students progress through the years of undergraduate and taught postgraduate study, suggesting that it may be a useful resource. However, significant variation is found across text types and disciplines. While the former is relatively minor, the latter is extensive, suggesting the list is more relevant to some student writers than others. An analysis by items indicates that around half of the words on the list are used very little. Moreover, the items which are frequent differ across disciplines. However, a small core of 427 items was found to be frequent across 90% of disciplines. This suggests that a generic productive academic vocabulary does exist, but that it is smaller in scope than the full Academic Vocabulary List.
This article presents our new Academic Vocabulary List (AVL), derived from a 120-million-word academic subcorpus of the 425-million-word
Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA; Davies 2012). We first explore reasons why a new academic core list is warranted, and why such a list is still needed in English language
education. We also provide a detailed description of the large academic corpus from which the AVL was derived, as well as
the robust frequency and dispersion statistics used to identify the AVL. Our concluding case studies show that the AVL discriminates
between academic and other materials, and that it covers ∼14% of academic materials in both COCA (120 million+ words) and
the British National Corpus (33 million+ words). The article concludes with a discussion of how the AVL can be used in settings
where academic English is the focus of instruction. In this discussion, we introduce a new web-based interface that can be
used to learn AVL words, and to identify and interact with AVL words in any text entered in the search window.
The high-frequency vocabulary of English has traditionally been thought to consist of the 2,000 most frequent word families, and low-frequency vocabulary as that beyond the 10,000 frequency level. This paper argues that these boundaries should be reassessed on pedagogic grounds. Based on a number of perspectives (including frequency and acquisition studies, the amount of vocabulary necessary for English usage, the range of graded readers, and dictionary defining vocabulary), we argue that high-frequency English vocabulary should include the most frequent 3,000 word families. We also propose that the low-frequency vocabulary boundary should be lowered to the 9,000 level, on the basis that 8-9,000 word families are sufficient to provide the lexical resources necessary to be able to read a wide range of authentic texts (Nation 2006). We label the vocabulary between high-frequency (3,000) and low-frequency (9,000+) as MID-FREQUENCY vocabulary. We illustrate the necessity of mid-frequency vocabulary for proficient language use, and make some initial suggestions for research addressing the pedagogical challenge raised by mid-frequency vocabulary.
This article considers the notion of academic vocabulary: the assumption that students of English for academic purposes (EAP) should study a core of high frequency words because they are common in an English academic register. We examine the value of the term by using Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) to explore the distribution of its 570 word families in a corpus of 3.3 million words from a range of academic disciplines and genres. The findings suggest that although the AWL covers 10.6% of the corpus, individual lexical items on the list often occur and behave in different ways across disciplines in terms of range, frequency, collocation, and meaning. This result suggests that the AWL might not be as general as it was intended to be and, more importantly, questions the widely held assumption that students need a single core vocabulary for academic study. We argue that the different practices and discourses of disciplinary communities undermine the usefulness of such lists and recommend that teachers help students develop a more restricted, discipline-based lexical repertoire.
This article describes the development and evaluation of a new academic word list (Coxhead, 1998), which was compiled from a corpus of 3.5 million running words of written academic text by examining the range and frequency of words outside the first 2,000 most frequently occurring words of English, as described by West (1953). The AWL contains 570 word families that account for approximately 10.0% of the total words (tokens) in academic texts but only 1.4% of the total words in a fiction collection of the same size. This difference in coverage provides evidence that the list contains predominantly academic words. By highlighting the words that university students meet in a wide range of academic texts, the AWL shows learners with academic goals which words are most worth studying. The list also provides a useful basis for further research into the nature of academic vocabulary.
This article has two goals: to report on the trialling of fourteen 1,000 word-family lists made from the British National Corpus, and to use these lists to see what,vocabulary,size is needed for unassisted,compre- hension,of written and spoken,English. The trialling showed,that the lists were,properly,sequenced,and there were,no glaring omissions,from the lists. If 98% coverage of a text is needed for unassisted comprehension, then a 8,000 to 9,000 word-family vocabulary is needed for comprehension of written text and a vocabulary of 6,000 to 7,000 for spoken text. Résumé : L’article a pour objectif de parler des essais menés sur
This study is a corpus-based lexical study that aims to explore the use of words in Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) in journal articles in the field of applied linguistics. A 1.5 million-word corpus called the Applied Linguistics Research Articles Corpus (ALC) was created for this study. The corpus consists of 200 research articles that have been published in five applied linguistics journals, namely, Applied Linguistics, Language Learning, The Modern Language Journal, Second Language Research, and TESOL Quarterly. Results show that AWL words account for 11.17% of the entire ALC. Using both frequency and range as the criteria for word forms selection, this study identifies 475 AWL and 128 non-AWL word forms that are used more than 50 times in the ALC and at least five times across the five journals. Most of the AWL word forms belong to the word families included in Coxhead’s first and second sublists. The non-AWL word forms are specialized terms in applied linguistics, terms related to language education and research methodology, and adjectives/nouns indicating countries/languages. Pedagogical implications are made for both teachers and learners of academic English as a foreign language.
The estimate of English speech rates most widely known to teachers and researchers in EFL is that provided by Pimsleur et
al. (1977). However, Pimsleur et al.'s estimate of standard rates of speech was based on one particular variety of English:
that of radio news announcers. Moreover, Pimsleur et al.'s data included the speech rates of French-speaking radio news accouncers,
and the range of speech rates they reported reflected the wide variations found between the French-speaking announcers rather
than the smaller variations between the English-speaking announcers.
Speech produced in four different types of situation (conversations, academic lectures, interviews, and radio monologues)
was analysed in order to check whether the standard range of speech rates reported by Pimsleur et al. was applicable to different
varieties of English. It was found that this was not the case and an alternative range of speech rates is proposed.
TED talks as listening teaching strategy in EAP classroom
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