Examining the implementation of academic vocabulary, lexical density, and speech rate features on OpenCourseWare and Mooc lectures

Bibliographic Data

ID21632032
AuthorsChen-Yu Liu (0000-0002-4693-5667, English Language Center, Ming Chuan University, Taoyuan, Taiwan, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume31
Issue8
Pages4924-4939
Publication date2023-11-17
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueInteractive Learning Environments (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1049-4820 • E-ISSN: 1744-5191
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/10494820.2021.1987274
OpenAlexW3206070753
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited23

OpenCourseWare (OCW) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have gained increasing popularity and importance because they greatly expand students’ access to university lectures. Although the main component of OCW and MOOC platforms is lectures, their differences may potentially affect the difficulty of academic listening comprehension. This study thus explores the extent to which the differences between OCW and MOOC lectures may affect L2 academic listening comprehension in terms of three affecting factors: academic vocabulary coverage, lexical density, and speech rate. The result shows that both OCW and MOOC lectures have a high academic vocabulary coverage, with many more higher-level academic words appearing in the current MOOC lectures. Moreover, the lexical density and speech rate of MOOC lectures are significantly higher than those of OCW lectures, suggesting that students may need to process denser information delivered at a faster speech rate when viewing MOOC lectures. It is thus concluded that comprehending MOOC lectures may demand higher-level academic listening skills and a larger academic vocabulary size. The findings can provide implications for EAP instruction in terms of using OCW and MOOC lectures as academic listening materials for students with different academic vocabulary knowledge and listening proficiency levels

Academic year · Active listening · Linguistics · Mathematics education · Popularity · Vocabulary · Computer Science · Educational Technology and Assessment · Online Learning and Analytics · Psychology · Text Readability and Simplification

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