To What Extent May EFL Undergraduates with EMI Develop English Vocabulary? The Case of Civil Engineering

Autor/in	Hsu, Wenhua
Titel	To What Extent May EFL Undergraduates with EMI Develop English Vocabulary? The Case of Civil Engineering
Quelle	In: LEARN Journal: Language Education and Acquisition Research Network, 15 (2022) 1, S.469-494 (26 Seiten) PDF als Volltext kostenfreie Datei Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	2630-0672
Schlagwörter	Civil Engineering; Engineering Education; Undergraduate Students; Computational Linguistics; Majors (Students); English (Second Language); Second Language Learning; Second Language Instruction; Benchmarking; Nonmajors; Incidental Learning; Language of Instruction; Textbooks; Language Variation; North American English; Foreign Countries; Vocabulary Development; Linguistic Input; Word Frequency; United Kingdom + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Ingenieurausbildung; Linguistics; Computerlinguistik; English as second language; English; Second Language; Englisch als Zweitsprache; Zweitsprachenerwerb; Fremdsprachenunterricht; Inzidentelles Lernen; Teaching language; Unterrichtssprache; Textbook; Text book; Schulbuch; Lehrbuch; Sprachenvielfalt; Amerikanisches Englisch; Ausland; Wortschatzarbeit; Sprachbildung; Word analysis; Frequency; Wortanalyse; Häufigkeit; Großbritannien
Abstract	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 and offer EFL non-English-major students a channel for exposure to English. A 6-million-token textbook corpus of civil engineering (CE) compulsory courses was compiled and the vocabulary level thereof along the word frequency scale of the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English was measured. Then the researcher sought to estimate how many new words CE majors with EMI can encounter often enough to have an opportunity of learning them. Results show that CE textbooks reached the 5th 1000-word-family level at 95% text coverage and stretched to the 10th 1000 at 98% coverage. Beyond the first 3000 word families, only 3,433 word families occurred 12+ times. This frequency was assumed as a benchmark for incidental learning to occur. For EMI practitioners who are concerned with their students' vocabulary development, the results can serve as a reference for future investigations into other disciplines. (As Provided).
Anmerkungen	Language Institute of Thammasat University. The Prachan Campus, 2 Prachan Road, Bangkok 10200 Thailand. e-mail: learnjournal@gmail.com; Web site: https://www.tci-thaijo.org/index.php/learn
Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2024/1/01