How well does teacher talk support incidental vocabulary acquisition?
Open accessAbstract
Opportunities 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.
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In an ESL advanced classroom, only 2% of words used by the teacher were at the mid frequency level, while 97% were at the high frequency level.
“Only 2% of the words used by the teacher were at the mid frequency level, while 97% were at the high frequency level.”
From The Vocabulary Knowledge of Saudi EFL Tertiary Students (2019) · cites this paper as Horst (2010)
The Comprehensibility section says that on the first day, 97.68% of the teacher's words came from the 2,000 most frequent word families, while about 2% fell outside those lists. It does not classify that 2% specifically as mid-frequency words, and Table 1 shows that the high-frequency share across the entire course was 95.76%, not approximately 97%. (LLM, conf=0.88)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredAttending such ESL advanced classes seems to be unhelpful in acquiring much crucial vocabulary.
“The researcher concluded that attending such classes seems to be unhelpful in acquiring much crucial vocabulary.”
From The Vocabulary Knowledge of Saudi EFL Tertiary Students (2019) · cites this paper as Horst (2010)
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References 36 · Cited by 79
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- Authors
- Horst, M.
- Affiliations
- Concordia University (CA)
- Corresponding author
- Horst, Marlise
- Venue
- Reading in a Foreign Language
- Published
- 2010-04-01
- Volume
- 22
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 161-180
- ISSN
- 0264-2425 (ISSN-L)
- 1539-0578
- OpenAlex
- W2150757988
- Cited by
- 79
- References
- 36
- Citations by year
- 2025: 2 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 29 · 2021: 2 · 2020: 19 · 2019: 3 · 2017: 3 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 1 · 2013: 5 · 2012: 5
- FWCI
- 6.14
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Reading in a Foreign Language (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Spectrum Research Repository (Concordia University) (submittedVersion)
- ScholarSpace (University of Hawaii at Manoa) (submittedVersion)
- Reading in a Foreign Language
- Funders
- Concordia University
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Second Language Acquisition and Learning
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Reading and Literacy Development
- Keywords
- incidental vocabulary learning, teacher discourse, English as a second language, adult learners, word frequency, vocabulary retention, communicative language teaching, corpus analysis
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