The Relevance of Online Video Clips for the Online Informal Learning of English for Transport Technology – A Corpus-Based Approach

Abstract

As a result of the vast opportunities for the use of English in everyday online life, the field of online informal learning of languages, in particular English, has attracted a new wave of research attention. Importantly for this study, it has been confirmed that online engagement in activities involving the use of English has a positive effect on the development of English language proficiency, and that watching online video clips in English is one of the most frequent activities that students engage in. Nevertheless, the number of corpus-based studies in this field remains scant. In addition, no research study has addressed the relevance of online video clips for the online informal learning of English in the specific field of transport technology. In order to bridge this research gap, the objective of this paper is to adopt a corpus-based approach to explore whether a careful selection of video clips in the specific domain of transport technology has the potential to support or supplement the core course materials. The construction of a specialised corpus of video clips adopted a six-step methodology that allowed the preparation, collection, documentation, construction, analysis, and finally evaluation of the corpus. This corpus was then compared against the corpus of the core course materials in terms of lexical density, terminology, and four-grams. The findings of the study indicate that, if carefully selected, video clips have the potential to support the formal language learning process, and should therefore contribute to the understanding of the potential of online informal learning of English in discipline-specific settings; moreover, the adopted methodology may serve as a guide for informed audio-visual material selection and analysis in any language for specific purposes.