| Summary: | 碩士 === 南臺科技大學 === 應用英語系 === 105 === The purpose of the present research is to analyze the business-related corpus of TED Talks. The primary goals of research are: (1) to explore the frequency word list in TED Talks. (2) to explore the lexical coverage of TED Talks by the BNC/COCA Word List to understand what vocabulary frequency level can achieve an ideal 98% of text token coverage. (3) to analyze the lexical coverage of the TED Talks corpus using TOEIC Word Family List.
The reason for this study selecting TED Talks platform as an English learning tool is TED Talks platform has many kinds of learning content. Besides, TED speakers come from plural academic fields, providing many exciting videos; it not only allows users to learn English, but also to absorb the knowledge from various fields. Recently, many companies have adopted the TOEIC score to determine all employees’ ability of English communication. In order to understand the TED Talks as an English learning platform for the preparation of TOEIC is helpful or not, the researcher collected 316 transcripts of business speeches from TED Talk website (Totally consist of 628,437 running words) for the corpus, and used AntConc and AntWordProfiler software to analyze.
The findings are summarized as follows: (1) there are 68% of function words and 32% of content words in the top 100 words of TED Talks Corpus. In the first 200 frequency vocabulary, the proportion of functional words gradually reduced, and the proportion of content words gradually increased; (2) at least 6,000 word families are needed to meet the ideal reading lexical coverage of TED Talks Corpus in BNC/COCA Word List, while at least 3,000 word families are needed to meet the ideal listening lexical coverage of TED Talks Corpus in BNC/COCA Word List; (3) the lexical coverage of TED Talks Corpus in TOEIC Word Family List is 13.02 %; (4) the participants generally thought that watching TED Talks video facilitates preparation for reading and listening of TOEIC.
It is hoped that the finding of this study can be used to prepare for TOEIC. Besides, test-takers can use TED Talks and BNC/COCA Word List as a learning tool to increase the listening and reading ability. Meanwhile, the researcher hopes that this study can not only assist test-takers in achieving desirable scores, but also guide English teachers to use TED Talks as a learning tool to increase learner motivation, and to expand English vocabulary.
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