Linking Extramural Exposure and Oral Proficiency

In an increasingly digital world, many young learners are exposed to English without ever taking a class. Researchers have shown various benefits from extramural exposure to English (De Wilde et al., 2020; Kusyk et al., 2025). However, it is not clear to what extent extramural exposure can compare to formal learning in terms of general proficiency, including sentence complexity, vocabulary and accuracy. The data in the current study comes from two groups of Hungarian learners. One group of learners studies English in a Bilingual English program with explicit instruction, and the other group, who study German and have learned English implicitly through extramural exposure. On average, the Bilingual English students achieved higher proficiency as indicated by scores on the Cambridge Young Learners Exam. For this study, we focused on the 4 top-scoring participants (all at A2 level) from both groups and compared them in an oral picture storytelling task. Speech samples were analyzed on linguistic features that show stages of proficiency development (cf. Verspoor et al., 2012): mean length of utterance, use of tenses, use of low-frequency words, and general accuracy. The English students scored similarly in mean length of utterance, with both groups’ average being 9.1 words per utterance. The German students scored higher in the use of past tense (74% compared to 31%) and in accuracy (82% compared to 46%). The two groups display similar vocabularies and use of Low-frequency words. These results show that oral skills can develop through implicit learning, specifically demonstrating the ability to implicitly learn grammatical structures and vocabulary. The findings support previous research (Peters, 2018; Rousse-Malpat, 2019). These results help understand language learning and may influence and improve teachers' methods.