Lexical Density Research Articles

Suitability of science & technology documentaries for EAP and EST listening

Selecting English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and English for Science and Technology (EST) listening materials is a challenging task as many different criteria could inform that choice. This study examines the suitability of science and technology documentaries for EAP and EST listening based on a corpus of 100 such documentaries. Departing from the premise that criteria such as thematic suitability, appeal and visual support for the vocabulary presented, as well as the fact that they are delivered in standard English, might recommend science and technology documentaries for this purpose, we further explore their lexical profile, lexical density and speech rate, so as to pass a more informed judgement in this regard. The results obtained are compared against those for academic lectures in general and science lectures in particular. They show that science and technology documentaries may be reasonably followed with a vocabulary size of 3,000 to 4,000 words, similar to what is required for lectures. Additionally, this genre is a good source of academic and technical vocabulary. Its higher lexical density is compensated by its slower delivery than that of lectures. Based on this, we support the inclusion of science and documentary films as EAP and EST materials.

Concurrent relations between child-directed speech and children’s language skills in low-income households

This study examined the dimensionality of caregivers’ child-directed talk and the association of child directed talk and children’s language skills at age of 3 years in a sample of 63 low-SES dyads in low-SES homes. Exploratory factor analysis identified that caregivers’ child directed talk is characterized by two dimensions: quantity and complexity. The quantity factor consisted of utterances per minute, total number of words, and type-token ratio, whereas the complexity factor included mean length of utterance and the percentage of complex utterances. After controlling for covariates (e.g. child age, race, maternal education, and language used at home), CDT complexity was significantly related to children’s receptive and expressive language skills, however, this association was not significant for CDT quantity. These results have important implications for intervention development.

Improving access to COVID-19 information by ensuring the readability of government websites.

Issue addressedThis study evaluated the readability of web pages from two public‐facing Victorian government websites that were responsible for communicating key health messages relating to the COVID‐19 pandemic in 2020.MethodsWebpages were downloaded and filtered to identify relevant materials (English language materials containing HTML files that referred to COVID‐19). The files were converted to text files and two Python packages, SpaCy and TextStat were used to obtain the data presented here. In addition to running two well‐established readability tests, SMOG Index (Simple Measure of Gobbledygook) and Flesch Reading Ease formula, we also calculated the figures for sentence length and word length, which drive the readability measures and allow a disaggregated view of the data. Type token ratio measures were conducted as a reflection of the breadth of vocabulary used in the web pages.ResultsDerived measures of text complexity were higher than recommended levels of text complexity for health promotion materials, which are generally set at senior primary school levels. This did not vary depending on the intended audience (public or professional). A senior secondary reading level was required for effective engagement with the text published on both sites.ConclusionsImproving the readability of materials on key government websites where information about COVID‐19 is being communicated to the public, represents a low cost and potentially effective means of improving public understanding of the pandemic and the steps individuals need to take to protect themselves and the community.So what?Given the challenges widely identified in ensuring compliance with protective behaviours, confidence in seeking vaccination and increasing distrust of government, it would be strategic to improve public communication to ensure health messages are simple and readily understood.SummaryThe complexity and readability of text contained in web pages during 2020 from two Victorian government departments were evaluated. Communication regarding the restrictions and the management of risks associated with COVID‐19 was the main focus of these 367 individual web pages from the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and the Department of Education and Training (DET). Results indicated that across both sites and on both readability measures used, an education level equivalent to senior secondary school would be required to readily understand the contents.

Vocabulary Transfer from Reading to Writing: A Comparison of Essay Writing and Synchronous CMC

Reading-integrated writing is known as an effective approach to teaching and learning vocabulary as it allows students to transfer vocabulary from a source text to writing. This study examines whether vocabulary transfer from an input text to writing varies according to the two types of tasks: essay writing and synchronous text chat. One hundred Korean college students from four “Reading and Writing” classes performed both tasks, and their vocabulary use was compared between the two tasks. The tokens and the types of words used in essay writing and chatting were compared against a base wordlist constructed from the input text, and their lexical profiles were analyzed using various programs, such as RANGE, VocabProfile, and WordSmith. The findings show that more varied words were transferred from the source text to the chat scripts than to the essays. While the lexical diversity was slightly greater in the chat scripts than in the essays, the difference was not statistically significant. Interestingly, the chat scripts exhibited the same level of lexical density (i.e., the ratio of content words to function words) as the essays. It can be inferred from the findings that the synchronous chat provides a valuable context for practicing target language, and that it is as useful as essay writing for promoting vocabulary transfer from reading to output production. In addition, the findings suggest that reading can become a beneficial source of language input that leads to output production.

Lexical Density and Readability of the Facil’s ‘Advanced Learning Textbook’ for Indonesian High School Students

This article discusses the lexical density and readability levels in Facil's 'Advanced Learning English textbook for high school students in grade XI. The documents of this study were 11 reading texts selected from each chapter in the 'Advanced Learning English 2' textbook. This study's objectives are to (1) determine the average lexical density of selected reading passages from English textbooks and (2) determine the next level of this book and whether it is appropriate for high school students class XI. Grounded on Ure’s (1971) text analysis, the researchers analyzed the lexical density of the reading text. Meanwhile, to determine readability level, Flesch’s (1994) reading ease scale formula was utilized. After carefully analyzing the data, it was discovered that almost all texts had a high lexical density. The average reading text in this book has a higher lexical density level than 40%. Additionally, eleven reading texts are classified into five levels based on the Flesch reading ease formula's results: easy for one text, fairly easy for three texts, and difficult for four texts. For two texts, the difficulty level is standard; for three texts, the difficulty level is fairly difficult; and for two, the difficulty level is difficult. Therefore, reading texts in this book is considered appropriate for high school students’ learning process because each text has a different and gradual difficulty level.

Synergic Concepts, Lexical Idiosyncrasies, and Lexical Complexities in Bilingual Students’ Translated Texts as Efforts to Resolve Conceptual Inequivalences

The purpose of this study is to draw on the conceptual blending hypothesis from the socio-cognitive approach to investigate the conceptually equivalent translation written in L2—English—of bilingual students via two tasks of translating and defining individual words and translating texts from L1 to L2. Next, the study demonstrates how translation abilities that vary amongst groups can affect students’ lexical density, lexical diversity, lexical sophistication, and lexical idiosyncrasies in translated text. The translating process in bilinguals could be interpreted via the lens of the conceptual blending hypothesis and dueling contexts framework to demonstrate that bi/multilingual students do not differ from monolingual ones pertaining to cognitive or linguistic abilities. Rather, the distinctive difference between bilingual and monolingual language users is bilingual speakers’ abilities of the third competence of formulating a synergism across word concepts and utilizing a bidirectional translation between two languages. When a word in L2 is acquired, there is a conceptual blending between the new conceptual information, encoded after each time the L2 word is used in an L2 socio-cultural context and the existing socio-cultural conceptual information in L1. The new concept created after the blending is called a synergic concept. If the synergic is not well developed, the language user selects incorrect or inappropriate words in a context, resulting in lexical idiosyncrasies. Data gathered from 30 English–Chinese bilingual university students in a transnational program in sociology were collected and compared against 15 monolingual American students. The preliminary findings are as follows: (1) regardless of the location of where the English (L2) socio-cultural meaning conceptualization mainly takes place (in China or the U.S.A.), English–Chinese bilingual language users demonstrated a significant difference in connotative meaning knowledge of noun word concepts and idiomatic concepts, compared with English native speakers; (2) the synergic concepts were detected in all experimental concepts and demonstrated the conceptual blending to a varying degree that affects their translating process and its outcomes: the domineering L1 socio-cultural concept, the well-blended L1 and L2 socio-cultural concept that results in a “third culture”, and the assimilating L2 socio-cultural concept; (3) the synergistic blending of two socio-cultural loads embedded in lexical concepts detected in the bilingual students in the U.S.A. was more robust than those in China, resulting in significantly fewer sophisticated words and lexical idiosyncrasies in their English translated essays. The study sheds new light on understanding the dynamism in bilingualism via translation tasks to indicate bilingual learners’ lexical development. Implications for using translation tasks and analysis of word concepts across languages to support bi/multilingual students in language and academic learning are discussed.

Lexical Richness of Short Stories Written by EFL Students

The study concerns with lexical richness of short stories. The data consist of 48 short stories written by English Study Program of University of Trunojoyo Madura. This study aims at measuring the lexical richness of short stories by different gender based on three measurements, i.e. lexical density, lexical sophistication, and lexical variation. This study employs the theory and the lexical richness formula proposed by Laufer and Nation (1995). It applies descriptive quantitative design. The results showed that the results of each measurements are 11 short stories in high lexical density (LD), 37 short stories in quite high LD, 27 short stories in high Lexical Sophistication (LS), 21 short stories in low LS, 25 short stories in high Lexical Variation (LV), and 23 short stories in low LV, the results of lexical richness that obtained from the combination of LD, LS, and LV are high lexical richness category (5 stories), quite high category (14 stories), quite low category (20 stories), and low category (9 stories), and the results of lexical richness based gender differences show that the short stories of male authors have higher lexical richness than female authors. The overall results show that short stories written by English Study Program students of University of Trunojoyo Madura have quite low lexical richness.

절대 평가제 도입 이후 수능 영어 독해지문의 난이도 분석

Objectives The purpose of the present study is to investigate whether the CSAT(College Scholastic Ability Test) English reading passages are consistent in the level of difficulty on the basis of the criterion-referenced assessment introduced in the 2018 academic year.
 Methods To achieve this goal, English reading passages from the 2018-2021 academic years were collected and analyzed with 25 measures for lexical complexity(lexical density, lexical sophistication, and lexical variation) and 14 measures for syntactic complexity(length of production, sentence complexity, subordination, coordination, and particular structures). In order to see if there was a statistically significant difference among the four tests, one-way ANOVA was performed.
 Results The results show that there was no significant difference in terms of lexical complexity and syntactic complexity among the CSAT English reading passages during the academic years 2018-2021.
 Conclusions This suggests that there was no significant yearly variance in the CSAT English sections under the criterion-referenced assessment. Additionally, the findings of this study provides some pedagogical implications and suggestions for the implementation of the criterion-referenced assessment.

Interplay of a Learner’s Regulatory Focus and Genre on Second Language Writing

Many empirical findings of previous studies have suggested a connection between motivational factors and L2 writing. Nonetheless, the impact of motivational factors on the genre-based L2 writing has not gained much attention. The present study explored the extent to which the characteristics of two writing tasks involving different genres interact with a learner’s motivational disposition (regulatory focus) and, further, affect language production of writing. 106 essays collected from 53 university EFL learners were assessed in terms of linguistic complexity and accuracy. 2X2 ANOVA results revealed significant main effects of genre on lexical complexity (lexical variation and MSTTR). More importantly, there were significant interaction effects between genre and regulatory focus on both measures of the syntactic complexity (mean length of T-unit and clause per T-unit) and lexical complexity (lexical density). The findings highlighted the significance of learners’ motivational dispositions in genre writing. Drawing on the findings, some pedagogical suggestions to ensure the effectiveness of writing tasks on L2 development were proposed.

Leksiskās daudzveidības kvantitatīvā analīze latviešu prozas izpētē

The notions of richness of language and richness of the vocabulary are characteristics that are often mentioned in the context of practical literary criticism, however, from the theoretical standpoint, the precise meaning of these terms is not clear. Considering that this area of research is not well known in Latvia, the paper first outlines the field of study of vocabulary richness and lexical diversity and maps out the challenges that are related to it, including issues pertaining to selecting the focus and methodology of the study, selecting data, and evaluating the quality of data. Furthermore, the interpretation of the results of the analysis of lexical diversity is discussed, arguing that the vocabulary richness of a literary work does not necessarily indicate only the level of language competencies and artistic skill, it can also be interpreted as a trait of a literary genre or a subject of the artistic choice. Two methods of accounting for lexical diversity are analysed more closely – mean segmental type-token ratio (MSTTR) and moving window type-token ratio distribution (MWTTRD); the main idea and application, as well the place of these approaches among other methods are explained. To conduct the test study, the authors are using a small corpus that entails six Latvian prose writers – Alberts Bels, Augusts Deglavs, Regīna Ezera, Jānis Jaunsudrabiņš, Ivande Kaija, and Zigmunds Skujiņš. In the course of the study it is established that higher values of lexical diversity are achieved by the authors who represent more recent generation – Skujiņš, Ezera, Bels. To suggest further possibilities of employment of these methods in the studies of the stylistics of literary prose, the authors of the paper turn attention towards the diversity of adjectives in the works of the corpus. The MSTTR and MWTTDR of adjectives are measured; the percentage of adjectives that are shared by all authors and the percentage of unique adjectives for each author are being calculated. In conclusion, further developments of quantitative and qualitative digital analysis of prose texts are being suggested.

Automating Lexical Complexity Measurement in Chinese with WeCLECA

Lexical complexity, generally understood as a multidimensional construct consisting of lexical density, sophistication, and diversity, has been recognized as an important construct in first language acquisition and second language acquisition. A large variety of lexical complexity measures have been proposed by researchers to study its relationship to second language learners’ writing and/or speaking proficiency. While this line of research has generated fruitful results for languages such as English and other Indo-European languages, less is known about how it may be applicable to a typologically distance language such as Chinese. In this paper, we report the design of a computational tool for automating the measurement of lexical complexity with 25 indices. The Batch Mode of the software supports analyses of a large number of .txt files and outputs results to a .CSV file suitable for importation into statistical packages for further analyses. In an example application, we analyzed 87 texts from three distinct registers (academic prose, fiction, and press reportage) from the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (McEnery and Xiao, The Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese: A corpus for monolingual and contrastive language study, in Proc. Fourth Int. Conf. Language Resources and Evaluation, eds. M. Lino, M. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa and R. Silva, (European Language Resources Association, Paris, 2014), pp. 1175–1178) and explored how register variation may manifest in lexical complexity. The ANOVA analyses showed linear increase in multiple lexical sophistication and diversity measures across academic prose, fiction and press reportage. The results showed that press reportage has lower lexical density, but higher lexical sophistication and diversity than academic prose; fiction also has higher lexical diversity than academic prose. This paper concluded with discussions of potential pedagogical applications for Chinese language teaching and learning.

Heritage Spanish Speakers’ Writing Development: Online vs. In-Person Peer-Tutoring Interventions

This article analyzes the writing development of heritage speakers (hs) of Spanish in an intermediate level composition course at the University of California, Davis. The data comprised 480 essays written by 80 students from two groups: one who received face-to-face peer tutoring before the covid-19 pandemic (Fall 2019), and one who received online tutoring during the pandemic (Fall 2020). These data were analyzed in terms of lexical richness as measured by (a) lexical density, (b) lexical sophistication, and (c) lexical variation in both in-person and online settings. Findings revealed that lexical density and lexical sophistication were similar in both groups. However, the online group had higher levels of lexical variation throughout their essays. We conclude that online tutoring is an effective alternative to face-to-face tutoring, showing no disadvantages in terms of students’ lexical richness and offering a significant advantage with respect to lexical variation. Finally, we offer suggestions for hs tutor training in an online setting.

English verb-argument construction profiles in a specialized academic corpus: Variation by genre and discipline

This study investigates genre and discipline effects on the frequency and contingency profiles of English Verb-Argument Constructions (VACs), with implications for English for Specific Purposes pedagogy. Specifically, 11 VACs that have featured prominently in recent analyses of general domain English usage in the British National Corpus are examined in a specialized corpus of 400 research articles. Analysis includes normalized frequency, type-token ratio, frequency rank, and delta P as a measure of verb-construction association strength, with the results analyzed across disciplines and in comparison to previous analyses on general domain English corpora. A clear consistency was found in the frequency and frequency ranks of VACs across the specialized and general corpora, which points towards the importance and meaningful nature of abstract constructions. At the same time, variation in the verb-construction contingency profiles also highlights the importance of genre and community. Findings are discussed within usage-based perspectives, with careful attention to the implications for English for Specific Purposes pedagogy.

Toward Data-Driven Radiation Oncology Using Standardized Terminology as a Starting Point: Cross-sectional Study

BackgroundThe inability to seamlessly exchange information across radiation therapy ecosystems is a limiting factor in the pursuit of data-driven clinical practice. The implementation of semantic interoperability is a prerequisite for achieving the full capacity of the latest developments in personalized and precision medicine, such as mathematical modeling, advanced algorithmic information processing, and artificial intelligence approaches.ObjectiveThis study aims to evaluate the state of terminology resources (TRs) dedicated to radiation oncology as a prerequisite for an oncology semantic ecosystem. The goal of this cross-sectional analysis is to quantify the state of the art in radiation therapy specific terminology.MethodsThe Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) was searched for the following terms: radio oncology, radiation oncology, radiation therapy, and radiotherapy. We extracted 6509 unique concepts for further analysis. We conducted a quantitative analysis of available source vocabularies (SVs) and analyzed all UMLS SVs according to the route source, number, author, location of authors, license type, the lexical density of TR, and semantic types. Descriptive data are presented as numbers and percentages.ResultsThe concepts were distributed across 35 SVs. The median number of unique concepts per SV was 5 (range 1-5479), with 14% (5/35) of SVs containing 94.59% (6157/6509) of the concepts. The SVs were created by 29 authors, predominantly legal entities registered in the United States (25/35, 71%), followed by international organizations (6/35, 17%), legal entities registered in Australia (2/35, 6%), and the Netherlands and the United Kingdom with 3% (1/35) of authors each. Of the total 35 SVs, 16 (46%) did not have any restrictions on use, whereas for 19 (54%) of SVs, some level of restriction was required. Overall, 57% (20/35) of SVs were updated within the last 5 years. All concepts found within radiation therapy SVs were labeled with one of the 29 semantic types represented within UMLS. After removing the stop words, the total number of words for all SVs together was 56,219, with a median of 25 unique words per SV (range 3-50,682). The total number of unique words in all SVs was 1048, with a median of 19 unique words per vocabulary (range 3-406). The lexical density for all concepts within all SVs was 0 (0.02 rounded to 2 decimals). Median lexical density per unique SV was 0.7 (range 0.0-1.0). There were no dedicated radiation therapy SVs.ConclusionsWe did not identify any dedicated TRs for radiation oncology. Current terminologies are not sufficient to cover the need of modern radiation oncology practice and research. To achieve a sufficient level of interoperability, of the creation of a new, standardized, universally accepted TR dedicated to modern radiation therapy is required.

MOTT, BRIAN (UB): Postmodificación de frases preposicionales en inglés y español (con referencia especial a postmodificadores locativos)

Las frases preposicionales constituyen el tipo más frecuente de posmodificación en todos los registros del inglés (Biber et a. 1999: 634). En el español, las expresiones locativas suelen incorporar un pronombre relativo y un verbo (the books [which are] on the table > los libros que están encima de la mesa), o bien expresarse mediante una frase introducida por la preposición de (los libros de encima de la mesa). Wonder (1979) sostiene que el español permite el uso de preposiciones que no sean de en las frases locativas en el caso de “situaciones ‘activas’” (el aterrizaje en pleno campo) frente a “situaciones estáticas” (*el sofá en la sala), y también si la frase puede tener una función adverbial antes que, o además de, una interpretación adjetiva (el ruido en la calle), sobre todo si dicha frase encierra la idea de una posición alternativa para un objeto, o bien un contraste con otro objeto similar (el sofá en la sala contigua). El presente estudio pretende examinar este argumento y, además, explorar la posmodificación preposicional en español de un modo más general, a la par que propone una explicación sobre la elección de estructura en español que se basa en el criterio de la densidad léxica.

Am I getting my point across? Microstructure of English classroom discourses by Acehnese teachers

For English teaching practice, productive talks that spur students’ comprehension, creativity, and problem-solving ability are vital. This research aimed at finding out the spoken discourse based on six phases of microstructure in English classrooms. The data were obtained recordings and observations of two English teachers, chosen through purposive sampling, from Islamic senior high schools in Aceh. The data were concerned with the lexical density or the ratio of content to grammatical or function words within a clause. They were analyzed through thematic analysis which consists of five steps: data familiarization, code generation, theme search, themes revision, and theme definition. It was found that the total lexical density obtained by the first teacher in Class A was 63.66% and in class, B was 66.52%, while the second teacher in Class A was 71. 74% and in Class B was 68.12%. The second teacher 2 in Class A had a higher lexical density than the first teacher even though both of them are considered to produce a high lexical density of around 60-70%. The formality of spoken discourse of the two teachers shows that the first teacher produced 172.5 while the second teacher produced 184. It means that the second teacher's spoken discourse was more formal than the first teacher’s discourse. To analyze the utterances of teachers and to find the density of language used in the classrooms during the teaching and learning process is important because they implicitly inform whether the language used is understandable for the students or not.

A Corpus-Assisted Translation Study of Strategies Used in Rendering Culture-Bound Expressions in the Speeches of King Abdullah II

Translation is defined as transferring meaning and style from one language to another, taking the text producer's intended purpose and the audience culture into account. This paper uses a 256,000-word Arabic-English parallel corpus of the speeches of King Abdullah II of Jordan from 1999 to 2015 to examine how some culture-bound expressions were translated from Arabic into English. To do so, two software packages were used, namely Wordsmith 6 and SketchEngine. Comparing the size of the Arabic corpus with its English counterpart using the wordlist tool of WS6, the researchers found that the number of words (tokens) in the English translation is more than the Arabic source text. However, the results showed that the Arabic language has more unique words, which means that it has more lexical density than its English counterpart. The researchers carried out a keyword analysis and compared the Arabic corpus with the ArTenTen corpus to identify the words that King Abdullah II saliently used in his speeches. Most of the keywords were culture-bound and related to the Jordanian context, which might be challenging to render. Using the parallel concordance tool and comparing the Arabic text with its English translation showed that the translator/s mainly resorted to the strategies of deletion, addition, substitution, and transliteration. The researchers recommend that further studies be conducted using the same approach but on larger corpora of other genres, such as legal, religious, press, and scientific texts.

Image Captioning Model Using Part-of-Speech Guidance Module for Description With Diverse Vocabulary

Image captions aim to generate human-like sentences that describe the image’s content. Recent developments in deep learning (DL) have made it possible to caption images for accurate descriptions and detailed expressions. However, since DL learns the relationship between images and captions, it constructs sentences based on commonly frequented words in the dataset. Although these generated sentences are highly accurate, they have low lexical diversity, unlike humans due to limited vocabulary. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a Part-Of-Speech (POS) guidance module and a multimodal-based image captioning model that determines the intensity of images and word sequences and generates sentences through POS to enhance the lexical diversity of DL. The proposed POS guidance module enables rich expression by controlling the information of images and sequences based on the predicted POS guidance to predict words. Then, the POS multimodal layer adds POS and output vector of Bi-LSTM using the multimodal layer to predict the next caption, considering the grammatical structure. We trained and tested the proposed model on the Flicker 30K and MS COCO datasets and compared them with current state-of-the-art studies. Also, we analyzed the lexical diversity of the caption model through the Type-Token Ratio (TTR) and confirmed that the proposed model generates sentences using several words.

A Corpus-Driven Study of the Style Variation in The Grapes of Wrath

The novel The Grapes of Wrath is distinctive in the arrangement of intercalary chapters and narrative chapters. Existing studies of the narratological distinction of this novel are primarily qualitative. This article conducted a corpus-driven study of the variation of styles in this novel from the perspectives of word cluster, type-token ratio, descriptivity and activity, keyness, and sentiment. The cluster analysis shows that the choice of words in the narrative chapters is more consistent than that in the intercalary chapters. The type-token ratio analysis testifies to the heterogeneity of the intercalary chapters in terms of lexical richness. The descriptivity and activity analysis and the keyness analysis reveal that the narrative chapters are more active than the intercalary chapters. The sentiment analysis finds that the novel is pervaded by negative sentiments and that negative sentiments are more prevalent in the narrative chapters than in the intercalary chapters. The research concludes that the corpus-driven study can provide insights into the narrative structure and the stylistic variation of the novel.

Potential Effect of Informal Learning of English Through Watching a Medical Television Series on the Development of Maritime Medical English Competence

As a result of the widespread use of online technologies and 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. Nevertheless, the number of corpus studies in this field remains low. More specifically, to date no research study has focused on the suitability of the language input to which online users are exposed while performing online activities with regard to the development of language skills in English as a language for specific purposes. In order to bridge this research gap, the objective of this paper is to apply the corpus approach to examine whether watching a medical television series may have an effect on the development of medical Maritime English for future deck officers. The results indicate that in terms of lexical density, lexical diversity, terminology, and word clusters, watching a medical television series may have a limited effect on the development of medical Maritime English for future deck officers. However, future research should examine whether watching television series may have an effect on the acquisition of typical speech patterns in spoken maritime communication, which are closely related to everyday spoken communication. Importantly, the results also seem to indicate that online informal learning of English cannot replace all segments of the formal learning of English for Specific Purposes, but can significantly contribute to the development of general English competence, which is a precondition for the further development of discipline-specific language competence.