To What Extent May EFL Undergraduates with EMI Develop English Vocabulary? The Case of Business Administration
Abstract
International colleges using the English-medium instruction (EMI) mode are gaining popularity among higher education institutions in Taiwan, where English is a foreign language (EFL). The researcher targeted English-medium university textbooks as a research focus, since they are first and foremost learning material of specialist knowledge and offer EFL non-English-majoring students a channel for exposure to English. A 7.2-million-token textbook corpus of business administration (BA) courses was compiled and the vocabulary level along the word-frequency scale of the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English was measured. Then the researcher sought to estimate how many new words EFL BA majors can encounter often enough for learning to occur. Results show that BA textbooks reached the 6th 1000-word-family level at 98% text coverage. Beyond the first 3000 word families, only 3,471 mid-frequency (the 4th to 9th 1000 level) word families and 547 low-frequency (from the 10th 1000 level onwards) word families occurred 12+ times. The occurrence of 12 times was assumed as a benchmark for incidental learning to occur. For international college practitioners who are concerned with their EFL students vocabulary development, the results can serve as a reference for future investigations into other disciplines.
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