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…

This paper contributes to a research program within extensive reading (ER) and "Reading in a Foreign Language" using corpora to simulate ER input to develop vocabulary through incidental learning to 9,000 words. This helps researchers/teachers evaluate ER. If corpora indicate no 'pathway' from smaller to larger vocabulary sizes through…

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,…

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…

This paper computes estimates of the potential for Extensive Reading (ER) and Extensive Viewing (EV) to support the academic and discipline-specific vocabulary needs of students. While research into ER/EV for general vocabulary is well-established, only recently has academic vocabulary begun to be researched. Given curriculum time constraints,…