With only about a third of students in US public schools achieving the NAEP Proficient level, many educators believe students are not getting enough reading practice. However, how much reading practice is enough? This study quantifies the relationship between the amount of book reading and the expected number of words learned. We collected 45…

Learning vocabulary is a central but yet complex aspect of learning a language. Hence, researchers stress the importance of facilitating vocabulary development via a structured approach to target words and recycling. While teaching materials have the potential to provide this structure to all students in a classroom, few studies have investigated…

Collocational knowledge is central to communicative competence, but many second language (L2) learners struggle to acquire this aspect. To address this limitation, the present study investigated if textual enhancement and frequency manipulation would affect incidental learning of collocations from reading. Fifty-four first language (L1) Cantonese…

Background: Vocabulary learning in a second language (L2) encompasses crucial aspects, including single words and collocations. Research indicates that L2 learners can incidentally learn single words from captioned videos, but less is known about the incidental learning outcomes of collocations, let alone the differences in learning gains for…

This study evaluates the potential for incidentally learning early reading vocabulary through the extensive viewing (EV) of children's movies/television with subtitles. Recent research has investigated how much exposure to important vocabulary EV and extensive reading (ER) provides. Investigations compute the number of repetitions of target…

The present study investigated the lexical demands of scripted and unscripted television programs. To that end, two corpora consisting of 286 episodes from 14 different programs, both scripted and unscripted, were analyzed. The results indicated that the 1,000 most frequent word families, plus proper nouns, marginal words, transparent compounds,…

The current research investigates the lexical coverage of reading passages required for achieving the minimal and optimal levels of reading comprehension in a foreign language. More specifically, the aim of the study is to identify the word frequency bands within the reading passages in the English tests of The Higher Education Institutions…

Within instructed second language research, there is growing interest in research focusing on primary school vocabulary learning. Research has emphasized classroom-based learning of vocabulary knowledge, with growing focus on the potential for using captioned videos and increased word encounters. The present study investigated the effects of…

Research investigating incidental vocabulary learning through listening to songs has primarily relied on participants' self-report surveys on listening behaviors and its relationship with their vocabulary knowledge (Kuppens, 2010). Only one experimental study has investigated vocabulary learning gains from listening to songs (Medina, 1993). From…

This article reports on a study that combined two strands of research: studies of incidental vocabulary learning and studies of the classroom lexical environment (in which vocabulary exposure is measured and the potential for learning estimated). The study looked at the orthographic lexical environment in a language classroom over a semester and…

This study examined whether the reading passages in the new series of English-language textbooks for high-school students in Vietnam fostered reading comprehension and incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading by looking at four factors: the number of unfamiliar words in the texts, the importance of these words for text comprehension, the…

The research on incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading has claimed that repeated encounters of unfamiliar words and the context in which these words occur facilitate word learning. However, so far both variables have been investigated in isolation. This study was conducted to explore the impact of context types, word occurrence…

Vocabulary knowledge is very crucial for learners who want to be competent in a language. Vocabulary knowledge means having the knowledge of or command over words of a language and their usages in real-life contexts. Vocabulary knowledge can be gained incidentally and intentionally. The paper compares the effectiveness of the reading-only…

English-medium instruction (EMI) is gaining popularity among EFL higher education institutions. However, not all EMI programs provide the same English immersion as those in the Anglosphere. The researcher targeted English medium university textbooks as a research focus, since they are first and foremost learning material of specialist knowledge…

Sonbul and Schmitt (2013) showed that exposure to second language (L2) collocations in reading texts can produce gains in explicit knowledge, but they found no evidence of gains in implicit knowledge. This study is a conceptual replication and extension of Sonbul and Schmitt's research. Sixty-two advanced English as a second language (ESL)…