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

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 diff...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Interactive learning environments 2023-11, Vol.31 (8), p.4924-4939
Main Author: Liu, Chen-Yu
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Academic Language
academic listening
academic vocabulary
Colleges & universities
Density
Lecture Method
lexical density
Listening comprehension
Listening Skills
Massive Open Online Courses
MOOCs
Online instruction
OpenCourseWare
Public speaking
Speech
speech rate
Students
Vocabulary Development
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1049-4820
1744-5191
DOI:10.1080/10494820.2021.1987274