Niet Alleen Voor de Lol: De Lexicale Eisen en het Woordenschatleerpotentieel van Televisiekijken

The relationship between vocabulary and viewing comprehension Marion Durbahn Quinteros Supervisor: Elke Peters Co-supervisor: Michael Rodgers Lexical coverage refers to the percentage of known words in a piece of text (van Zeeland & Schmitt, 2013). There is a considerable amount of research into the relationship between lexical coverage and comprehension in a foreign (L2) language. Most research on lexical coverage, however, has been conducted on reading comprehension (Hu & Nation, 2000; Laufer, 1989; Laufer & Ravenhorst-Kalovski, 2010; Schmitt, Jiang, & Grabe, 2011). Those studies have suggested that 95% lexical coverage is needed to understand general information in a text, but 98% would be necessary for unassisted reading and detailed comprehension (Hu & Nation, 2000; Laufer & Ravenhorst-Kalovski, 2010). Studies on L2 listening comprehension have indicated that for comprehension of advanced listening passages, 98% coverage is recommended (Stæhr, 2009), but for more informal listening passages 90%-95% might be enough (Giordano, 2021; Noreillie, Kestemont, Heylen, Desmet, & Peters, 2018; Van Zeeland & Schmitt, 2012). To date, only two corpus studies have examined the vocabulary demands of TV programs and movies (Webb & Rodgers, 2009a; 2009b) based on coverage figures for reading, but no intervention studies have tested the lexical coverage that second and foreign language learners (ESL and EFL, respectively) require in order to comprehend audio-visual material without support of external sources such as dictionaries, on-screen texts or translators. It remains unclear whether coverage figures derived from reading and listening research can indeed be transferred to viewing, because verbal and visual representations complement each other (Mayer, 2009). On that premise, imagery may provide support to understanding the meaning of unknown words from context, and as a result participants would need smaller vocabulary sizes to comprehend audio-visual material than to read or listen to texts. This study aims to fill that gap by exploring the relationship between lexical coverage, imagery and viewing comprehension, and exploring the relationship between lexical coverage, imagery and vocabulary acquisition The first study explores the relationship between lexical coverage and viewing comprehension. The study also addresses the role of imagery in viewing comprehension by distinguishing between audio-based, audio plus imagery-based, and imagery-based comprehension questions. Ninety-six EFL learners took an aural meaning-recall test that assessed the words in the input and the updated Vocabulary Levels Test. Next, they viewed a 30-minute documentary that had the comprehension questions embedded. Results showed an almost medium-sized correlation between lexical coverage and viewing comprehension (rs (94) = .39). Results also showed a positive almost medium-sized correlation between audio-based questions and lexical coverage (rs (94) = .36), and a small-sized correlation between imagery-based questions and lexical coverage (rs (94) = .29). No relationship was observed between lexical coverage and imagery plus audio-based questions. No threshold for minimum comprehension was observed. The results indicate that the lexical demands for viewing are lower than those for reading but similar to those for listening. Implications for pedagogy and future research are discussed. The second study aims to investigate the effects of the degree of lexical coverage on viewing comprehension. It follows the methodology used by van Zeeland and Schmitt (2013). A counter-balanced within-participants design was used, in which different levels of lexical coverage were created by using non-words to replace 5%, 10% or 20% of the words in the video. Forty native and seventy-six non-native speakers took the updated Vocabulary Levels Tests followed by four 2-minute documentaries. After each clip, they answered some comprehension questions. Results indicated that 1) comprehension scores decrease as the number of unknown words in the input increases; 2) non-native speakers' results were higher than native speakers'; 3) 100% coverage was statistically significantly higher than 90% and 80% in both groups; 4) no threshold at which the comprehension scores significantly increase was observed; 5) at 80% coverage 63% of the native speakers and 72% of non-native speakers obtained at least 70% comprehension scores. The third study aims at researching the incidental vocabulary learning at different levels of lexical coverage. To date, no study has examined how lexical coverage affects the learning of new words. A sample of the potential non-words that can be learned incidentally is going to be extracted from short documentaries at different levels of lexical coverage. Participants are going to see the clips at different levels of lexical coverage, answer comprehension questions and after they will take two vocabulary tests. The project will end with a discussion of the methodological, theoretical and pedagogical implications of this research project.