Abstract
The article discusses an experiment that researched the intentional vs incidental ESP vocabulary uptake in two university groups of third year political science students and addresses the implications of using an authentic audiovisual material as an input text for an ESP course. The procedure of intentional vocabulary learning involved pre-teaching of lexical items and explicitly informing the students they would have to use the vocabulary in a following productive activity (writing an essay), while the incidental uptake took place in the course of self-study where the students had to watch an authentic audiovisual recording and then write an essay on the subject discussed in the video. The case study employed a quantitative research method to calculate the amount of the target words and collocations used in the written output, and a qualitative method to assess the accuracy of their usage. Two months later a delayed posttest was done to check the students’ productive knowledge of the target lexis form. The experiment correlated with output- and involvement load hypotheses, and had to assess the effect of a text-based output on learning outcomes, as well as observe how applicable is the involvement load hypothesis to analysing the students’ self-study strategies. The study showed that the intentional mode of learning outperformed the incidental acquisition by over 20% and suggested what factors may have enhanced the scope of the ESP vocabulary retention. Further studies could concentrate on evaluating ESP learners’ both productive and receptive target vocabulary competence over a longer-term perspective.
Highlights
Due to the importance of solid vocabulary knowledge for successful mastery of a foreign language, the mechanisms of L2 vocabulary retention have been researched from various perspectives
A study into incidental vocabulary retention was conducted by Nguyen and Boers (2018), who discuss the outcomes of content-focused activities in the input-output-input sequence based on a video recording serving as an input text
The aim of this paper is primarily to estimate the scope of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) vocabulary retention in content- versus languagefocused activity, the source of the vocabulary being an authentic TV talk show (BBC HARDtalk), and to analyse the factors which may have influenced the amount of the words and collocations retained; and secondly to assess the accuracy of the target vocabulary usage in the learners’ text-based output
Summary
Due to the importance of solid vocabulary knowledge for successful mastery of a foreign language, the mechanisms of L2 vocabulary retention have been researched from various perspectives. At the same time current studies, especially in the realm of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), have mainly concentrated on reading texts as the main source of new vocabulary input, leaving aside a mass of audiovisual materials ( unadapted ones, i.e., not accompanied with subtitles or transcripts) which recently have gained enormous popularity with learners, who often benefit from them as a source of incidental vocabulary learning. Another understudied area of vocabulary acquisition remains incidental uptake of collocations, with no agreement as for the factors that may enhance their retention. Unlike listening, reading has been in the centre of attention of numerous studies focussing on various aspects of vocabulary uptake: the number of encounters with the lexis, the presence of context, the interest students take in the topic, etc. (e.g. Lee & Polido, 2017; Webb, 2008; Ponniah, 2011; Xu, 2010), as well a more modest number of investigations into students’ behaviour when faced with the task of learning words in a list format (Pauwels, 2018)
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