How well does teacher talk support incidental vocabulary acquisition?

dc.contributor.authorHorst, Marlise
dc.date.accessioned2020-05-22T02:10:26Z
dc.date.available2020-05-22T02:10:26Z
dc.date.issued2010-04
dc.description.abstractOpportunities for incidental vocabulary acquisition were explored in a 121,000-word corpus of teacher talk addressed to advanced adult learners of English as a second language (ESL) in a communicatively-oriented conversation class. In contrast to previous studies that relied on short excerpts, the corpus contained all of the teacher speech the learners were exposed to during a 9-week session. Lexical frequency profiling indicated that with knowledge of 4,000 frequent words, learners would be able to understand 98% of the tokens in the input. The speech contained hundreds of words likely to have been unfamiliar to the learners, but far fewer were recycled the numbers of times research shows are needed for lasting retention. The study concludes that attending to teacher speech is an inefficient method for acquiring knowledge of the many frequent words learners need to know, especially since many words used frequently in writing are unlikely to be encountered at all.
dc.identifier.doi10125/66646
dc.identifier.issn1539-0578
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10125/66646
dc.publisherUniversity of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center
dc.publisherCenter for Language & Technology
dc.subjectincidental vocabulary acquisition
dc.subjectL2 vocabulary
dc.subjectESL teacher speech
dc.subjectspoken corpus
dc.subjectlexical frequency profiling
dc.subjectfrequency list
dc.subjectcoverage
dc.titleHow well does teacher talk support incidental vocabulary acquisition?
dc.typeArticle
dc.type.dcmiText
local.rfl.topicLexis
prism.endingpage180
prism.number1
prism.startingpage161
prism.volume22

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