Are Contrived Lecture Passages From International Academic English Assessments Lexically Comparable to Actual University Lectures?

ABSTRACT The vocabulary load of university lectures and the coverage of academic vocabulary in spoken discourse have been used as benchmarks in researching whether various listening sources lexically correspond to actual university lectures. However, it remains unexplored whether contrived lecture passages from international academic English assessments are comparable to university lectures in terms of vocabulary load and academic vocabulary coverage. This study examined two lexical characteristics of lecture passages from two internationally prevalent academic English assessments. Two corpora were developed from transcripts of lecture passages from 32 official practice tests of the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) and 10 past tests of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). Words from the two corpora were analyzed using the RANGE program. The results showed that the vocabulary load of the two corpora based on 90% and 95% coverage was 2000 and 3000 word families, respectively. The mean academic vocabulary coverage was 89.34%. The current and benchmark studies together suggest that contrived lecture passages from international academic English assessments are comparable to open‐access lectures in terms of vocabulary load and academic vocabulary coverage. Pedagogical suggestions, including the incorporation of lecture passages into classroom activities, are also discussed.