Corpus-Based Vocabulary Analysis of Friends: Implications for Incidental Vocabulary Learning

Abstract

The primary purpose of the current study was bi-fold. It was to investigate what vocabulary size was necessary to comprehend Friends, one of the most popular American situation comedies, and to explore the number and percentage of potential words that might be incidentally learned through watching the program. The transcripts of two hundred twenty six episodes from Friends season one through ten were compiled and analyzed utilizing RANGE. It was found that the determined vocabulary sizes corresponding to 95% and 98% text coverage were 2,000 and 4,000 word families respectively, indicating that a relatively small number of word families were needed to comprehend Friends when compared to other TV programs. It was also revealed that Friends provided substantial opportunities for incidental vocabulary learning. Provided that learners knew about 2,000 word families and 95% coverage was enough for the comprehension of Friends, the number and proportion of the potential word families were 525 and 11.90% respectively. Meanwhile, assumed that learners had a vocabulary size of 4,000 word families and 98% coverage was adequate for comprehension of Friends, the number and percentage of the potential word families were 186 and 6.17 % respectively.