Reynolds Barry Lee, Xie Xiaowen Serina, Pham Quy Huynh Phu
Faculty of Education, University of Macau, Macao, Macao SAR, China.
Centre for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, University of Macau, Macao, Macao SAR, China.
Front Psychol. 2023 Jul 26;14:1219159. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1219159. eCollection 2023.
Universities in non-Anglophone countries are increasingly implementing English as the medium of instruction (EMI) lectures. There seems to be an assumption that students' performance on standardized English examinations can be equated with the lexical knowledge needed to comprehend EMI lectures regardless of discipline. For unknown words students encounter, it is assumed that they can be through listening to these lectures. This potential for students to acquire unknown words incidentally while listening to these lectures has yet to be fully explored.
This study addresses the potential of students incidentally acquiring vocabulary from listening to EMI lectures through corpus analyses of computer science lectures at one public university in Macau. Taking into consideration frequency, range, and lecturer explanation, corpus analyses of the transcripts of 28 computer science lectures (40 h 36 min) were conducted to determine the lexical knowledge needed for students to comprehend the lectures. The potential number of words these students could acquire through listening to the lectures was also uncovered through further analyses.
Results showed that L2 students need to have receptive knowledge of the most frequent 3,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words to reach beyond 95% lexical coverage. To reach 98% lexical coverage, 5,000 word families are needed. Considering frequency, range, and teacher explanation, we concluded that 30 new words could reasonably be incidentally acquired after listening to the 28 lectures.
These results indicate a need for EMI lecturers to consider the lexical knowledge of students and whether additional pedagogical techniques (i.e., vocabulary explanation) should be employed in content classrooms when lectures are delivered in English, especially for specialized fields such as computer science. Our results also draw attention to the importance of field specific vocabulary and the potential pitfalls of using blanket English language admissions criteria when admitting students to different academic programs.
非英语国家的大学越来越多地采用英语作为授课语言（EMI）进行讲座。似乎有一种假设，即学生在标准化英语考试中的表现可以等同于理解全英文授课讲座所需的词汇知识，而不论学科如何。对于学生遇到的生词，假定他们可以通过听这些讲座来掌握。学生在听这些讲座时偶然习得生词的这种可能性尚未得到充分探索。
本研究通过对澳门一所公立大学的计算机科学讲座进行语料库分析，探讨学生从全英文授课讲座中偶然习得词汇的可能性。考虑到词频、范围和讲师讲解，对28场计算机科学讲座（40小时36分钟）的文字记录进行语料库分析，以确定学生理解讲座所需的词汇知识。通过进一步分析，还揭示了这些学生通过听讲座可能习得的单词数量。
结果表明，二语学生需要对最常用的3000个词族以及专有名词和边缘词有接受性知识，才能达到95%以上的词汇覆盖率。要达到98%的词汇覆盖率，则需要5000个词族。综合考虑词频、范围和教师讲解，我们得出结论，听了这28场讲座后，学生可以合理地偶然习得30个新单词。
这些结果表明，全英文授课的讲师需要考虑学生的词汇知识，以及在以英语授课的内容课堂上是否应采用额外的教学技巧（即词汇解释），特别是对于计算机科学等专业领域。我们的研究结果还提醒人们注意特定领域词汇的重要性，以及在录取学生进入不同学术项目时使用统一的英语入学标准可能存在的潜在问题。
