Xodabande Ismail, Ebrahimi Hourieh, Karimpour Sedigheh
Department of Foreign Languages, Kharazmi University, Tehran, Iran.
Department of Foreign Languages, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran.
Front Psychol. 2022 Sep 29;13:992638. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.992638. eCollection 2022.
Over the past years, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have emerged as new competitive advantages in the digital economy of higher education globally. Accordingly, an increasing number of individuals are attracted to these new learning environments for developing their knowledge and skills in a variety of subject areas. Despite these developments, research on linguistic features of MOOCs lectures as the main mediums for delivering the course contents remained limited. To address this gap, the present study analyzed a corpus of MOOCs lectures with around 4.45 million words to determine the size of vocabulary knowledge needed for 95 and 98% coverages. The findings revealed that sufficient coverage of the course contents requires knowledge of the 5,000 most frequent words in English. Nonetheless, achieving adequate coverage level requires a much larger vocabulary size of around 9,000 most frequent words in English. The study also found that widely used word lists for general and academic vocabulary (i.e., the GSL/AWL) fail to support MOOCs learners with sufficient vocabulary knowledge for adequate lexical coverage. Based on these findings, the study draws a number of implications for preparing non-native English speakers to use MOOCs effectively and setting research-informed vocabulary learning goals in instructional programs and materials.
在过去几年中，大规模开放在线课程（MOOCs）已成为全球高等教育数字经济中的新竞争优势。因此，越来越多的人被吸引到这些新的学习环境中，以在各种学科领域发展他们的知识和技能。尽管有这些发展，但作为课程内容主要传播媒介的MOOCs讲座的语言特征研究仍然有限。为了填补这一空白，本研究分析了一个约445万个单词的MOOCs讲座语料库，以确定达到95%和98%覆盖率所需的词汇量。研究结果表明，要充分覆盖课程内容，需要掌握英语中最常用的5000个单词。然而，要达到足够的覆盖率水平，需要更大的词汇量，大约是英语中最常用的9000个单词。该研究还发现，广泛使用的通用和学术词汇单词表（即GSL/AWL）未能为MOOCs学习者提供足够的词汇知识，以实现足够的词汇覆盖率。基于这些发现，该研究对帮助非英语母语者有效使用MOOCs以及在教学计划和材料中设定基于研究的词汇学习目标提出了一些启示。
