Examining lexical profile in general-audience English podcasts: A close replication of Nurmukhamedov and Sharakhimov (2021)

Abstract

We closely replicated Nurmukhamedov and Sharakhimov (2021), which was the first study to examine the lexical profile of general-audience English podcasts. Nurmukhamedov and Sharakhimov (2021) found that podcast listeners should have a knowledge of the most frequent 3,000 word families and 5,000 word families, respectively, plus proper nouns, marginal words, transparent compounds, and acronyms in order to achieve good and high-level listening comprehension. We followed the methods and procedures of the initial study with a much larger corpus. Specifically, a total of 8,862 podcast transcripts sampled from 12 general-audience podcast programs were used to compile the 14-million-word corpus. Results of the study confirmed Nurmukhamedov and Sharakhimov's (2021) findings in the vocabulary size required to understand general-audience English podcasts. However, some minor differences pertaining to individual podcast programs were revealed, indicating that the sampling of data had an effect on the lexical demand. These findings provide solid evidence to support the validity and generalizability of the initial study's findings. Implications for second language teaching and learning are also discussed.