Abstract
This empirical study examines the potential of YouTube worldwide trending videos for incidental vocabulary learning for the purposes of academic lectures and seminars at universities in English-speaking countries. YouTube is a popular social media platform that hosts videos of a wide range of genres, including vlogs (video blogs), songs, and news. Although previous studies have examined the potential of movies and TV programmes for incidental vocabulary learning, movies and TV programmes do not capture the wide range of genres that people are exposed to. To date, very little attention has been paid to the potential of YouTube for incidental vocabulary learning for academic listening. In this study, the lexical demands of a bespoke corpus of the transcriptions of YouTube worldwide trending videos were identified. Then, encounters with academic spoken word families with different frequency cut-offs were explored in the corpus of YouTube worldwide trending videos. The results reveal that YouTube trending videos have great potential for incidental vocabulary learning, creating a path from informal learning to academic language development. The present study has significant implications for incidental vocabulary learning through watching YouTube trending videos for adolescent and adult English language learners at the global level. It is recommended that YouTube trending videos are incorporated into EFL/ESL classes for adolescent and adult learners and that L2 learners watch these videos as part of their out-of-class learning activities to enhance their academic listening.
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Candarli, D. (2023). YouTube for Incidental Vocabulary Learning. In: Reynolds, B.L. (eds) Vocabulary Learning in the Wild. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1490-6_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1490-6_8
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