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The Vocabulary Coverage in American Television Programs

A Corpus-Based Study

NA3C 0006 Christina 周惠娟

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Introduction(What)

The study examine the BNC lists and the latest combination of the BNC and the COCA lists in terms of the vocabulary coverage, the different genres, appearing with high frequency but not included in the lists above through watching authentic American TV programs.

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Background

In EFL context, learners of English are hardly exposed to ample language input.

Television program, combining with reading and listening programs, is a source of motivating language input for EFL learners.

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Motivation

Television has not been widely investigated as a source of authentic materials for language learning.

Several research suggested there was great potential for learning vocabulary through media exposure, this study want to know how much learners can comprehend with learned vocabulary coverage.

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Research Questions

How many words are necessary to reach adequate comprehension in American television programs?

What is the vocabulary size necessary to reach respectively 95% and 98% coverage of the different genres?

What is the coverage of words Not Found in Any Lists consisting of the vocabulary items in the programs?

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Literature Review

Vocabulary needed for comprehension Several studies have investigated language learning

through watching television programs in different dimensions. (Wang,2012;Al-Surmi,2012;Csomay and Petrovic,2012;Kuppens,2010)

Wang(2012) suggested that by watching American drama, factors such as the authentic language, words in context, and the elements of drama all contribute to the learning of L2 vocabulary

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Literature Review

MacFadden, Barrett, and Horst(2009) compiled a list of specialized vocabulary that appeared frequently in television programs.

Whether the learners can guess words from context in order for incidental vocabulary learning .

Whether language learners watch television programs may depend on the vocabulary necessary to comprehend the programs.

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Literature Review

Vocabulary needed in reading Laufer(1989) find out the vocabulary coverage for EFL

learners to comprehend an authentic academic text, 95% coverage was suggested for reasonable comprehension.

Nation(2006) reviewed on several types of written texts, such as novels, newspaper, and graded readers, 98% was suggested to be the ideal coverage for comprehension.

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Literature Review

The studies on vocabulary coverage for reading comprehension varied since the difficulty of reading materials and language proficiency of learners varied as well.

95% and 98% coverage could be important measurements since the coverage indicated whether or not learners will be able to understand a reading text.

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Literature Review

Vocabulary needed in listening Bonk(2000) suggested that coverage far below 95%

was enough for listening comprehension with effective coping strategies.

Nation(2006) pointed out that if take 98% coverage necessary for comprehension, a 8,000-9,000 word-family vocabulary was needed for written text, and 6,000-7,000 word-family vocabulary would be enough for listening text.

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Literature Review

Vocabulary coverage in related texts Hwang and Nation(1989) investigated the vocabulary

in newspaper stories and their follow-up stories comparing to unrelated stories from newspapers.

Cho, Ahn, & Krashen(2005) suggested that language learners in the beginning level were motivated to read continually with narrow reading.

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Literature Review

The study choose coverage 95% and 98% as the lower and upper boundaries for comprehending American TV programs since which may possibly represent good comprehension of listening combining with reading.

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Literature Review

Vocabulary needed in television programs Low-frequency words were encountered rarely in sets of

movies and TV programs. (Web & Rodgers, 2009a &2009b, Web, 2007,2010a,2010b &2010c)

Nation(2006) examined how big a vocabulary the language learners need to understand the children’s movie, Shrek.

(the most frequent 4000 words from BNC provided 95% coverage)

(the most frequent 7000 words from BNC provided 98% coverage)

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Literature Review

Several studies investigated only the coverage of BNC corpus, this study explored the BNC, COCA, BNC/COCA word lists and the differences between the three lists.

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Literature Review

Related texts in television programs Webb(2011) TV programs, comparing to reading

materials, offer language learners to be exposed to a large amount of authentic language input with related texts.

Sheman(2003) Three basic genres in television programs were well-defined as procedurals, sitcoms, and serial dramas.

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Literature Review

Only two studies focused on the vocabulary coverage in related television programs(Rodgers & Webb, 2011 Webb,2011)

This study further divides the American television programs into nine subgenres: dramedy, drama, medical drama, legal drama, crime-thriller drama, supernatural/science-fiction drama, teen drama, period drama, and action drama.

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Methodology

Corpus data It analyzed the transcripts of 7,279 episodes of sixty

television programs, consisting of 31,323,019 running words, by using Range program.

The transcripts were downloaded from the TVsubtitles.net website.

The programs were chosen according to the following factors: popularity of the programs, genre, and availability of transcripts.

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Methodology

The word lists It used the BNC lists and the BNC/COCA lists to

determine the 1,000 level at which the words occurred.

It checked the validity of the word-family lists if they are properly ordered by three ways.

The word family are the unit of counting in the BNC lists, and the level of the word family was set at Level 6 in Bauer and Nation(1993) defining word families.

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Methodology

The BNC lists contain primarily written language with only 10% spoken language, the estimation of coverage might be a little conservative, and consist primarily of British text.

COCA is the corpus of the 400million words evenly divided between spoken and written language.

The BNC/COCA list were almost the same as the BNC lists. Twenty-five word family lists were developed based on frequency and range data.

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Methodology

Range program It is a computer program used to compare the

vocabulary in up to 32 different texts at the same time. This study used Range to investigate the coverage in

the sixty American TV programs by the BNC lists and the BNC/COCA lists.

Fourteen 1,000-word-frequency lists were used with the Range program to show which words occur in which level.

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Methodology

Proper nouns and marginal words such as, ah, oh, and um were listed in the fifteen and the sixteen lists.

Words in texts cannot be found in the lists are listed as “Not found in any lists”.

The BNC/COCA word family lists, expanded the size to twenty-five word family lists.

Limitation: It cannot distinguish homographs. The list integrated the BNC and COCA corpora, but

phrases weren’t included.

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Methodology

Analytical procedures The cumulative coverage of each program

was calculated by the three sets of lists to answer the research questions.

It carried out qualitative analysis to examine the differences between coverage in TV programs by the two sets of lists.

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Result

Coverage of individual programs The BNC lists provide 95% coverage for the most frequent

word families varying from 2,000 to 7,000 plus proper noun s and marginal words.

In the BNC/COCA lists, a vocabulary size varying from 2,000 to 6,000 word families would provide 95% coverage for the TV programs.

It need a vocabulary size of 5,000 to over 14,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words to reach 98% coverage.

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Result

Coverage of different genres TV programs of serial dramas and serial supernatural

dramas would be the least demanding. Procedurals and serial medical dramas were the most

challenging programs since they needed a larger vocabulary size to comprehend the TV programs.

Sitcom were dependent on the topics, which varied the most among all the genres.

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Result

Coverage of words not found in any lists The words were basically proper nouns, marginal

words, transparent compounds, and abbreviations, which were the four lists, added on to the BNC/COCA lists.

The new-forming word, such as Facebook, was not found in the lists.

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Result

Comparison of coverage distribution between the two lists

Both the lists could provide 95% coverage for TV programs at the 4,000- and 3,000-word level respectively.

The BNC/COCA lists added proper nouns could provide 98% coverage at the 10,000-word level, whereas the BNC lists couldn’t.

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Recommendation

Pedagogical implications It is important for teachers to consider the vocabulary

demands of the TV programs. Language teachers should pay much attention to

suitable vocabulary coverage for learners when selecting TV programs as learning materials.

Teacher could consider the necessity of pre-teaching or the specific vocabulary to the genre.

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Limitations

Vocabulary coverage is only one of many factors for TV programs comprehension, the background knowledge, the rate and clarity of speech may also affect comprehension of the programs.

More genres may be included in the future study to offer more suggestions.

Experimental studies are needed to determine whether learners could reach adequate or ideal comprehension with what percentage of coverage.