Computing curriculum time and input for incidentally learning academic vocabulary

This paper computes estimates of the potential for Extensive Reading (ER) and Extensive Viewing (EV) to support the academic and discipline-specific vocabulary needs of students. While research into ER/EV for general vocabulary is well-established, only recently has academic vocabulary begun to be researched. Given curriculum time constraints, information on which academic vocabulary items might be learnable incidentally is useful, and this study provides teachers with information on which specific academic vocabulary items from multiple academic wordlists have a reasonable chance of being learned incidentally. It operationalizes ER/EV through corpora representing general fiction, television programs, and movies. It estimates the pedagogical time it would take to meet target vocabulary at different possible thresholds for incidental learning (6, 12, 20 times) with estimates for each computed for multiple possible reading rates (100, 260, 350 wpm) and viewing rates (80, 140, 200 wpm). Results report individual curriculum time/input estimates for over 2000 academic vocabulary targets across multiple subjects. Findings indicate ER/EV are pedagogies that could substantially support academic vocabulary development. A tool is released for teachers to compute personalized estimates using the reading rates of their students.