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

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• OpenCourseWare
• Massive Open Online Courses
• academic listening
• academic vocabulary
• lexical density
• speech rate

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan (MOST) [grant number 110-2410-H-130-002].

Notes on contributors

Chen-Yu Liu

Chen-Yu Liu is a project assistant professor of the English Language Center at Ming Chuan University. Her research interests include corpus linguistics, computer assisted language learning, second language acquisition, and vocabulary acquisition.