“Yes, your honor!”: A corpus-based study of technical vocabulary in discipline-related movies and TV shows

Vocabulary is an essential element of every second/foreign language teaching and learning program. While the goal of language teaching programs is to focus on explicit vocabulary teaching to promote learning, “materials which provide visual and aural input such as movies may be conducive to incidental vocabulary learning.” (Webb and Rodgers, 2009, p. 412) The present study uses corpus-based techniques to investigate the extent to which watching discipline-related movies and TV shows in a second/foreign language may facilitate incidental learning of technical vocabulary. A corpus of 130,000 words was complied from movies/TV shows with legal content to track the frequency and vocabulary distribution of legal technical vocabulary items. The findings show that the majority of technical terms is encountered more than ten times in movies/shows, and that technical terms tend to co-occur together in particular segments of movies and episodes. The results suggest that the potential for incidental vocabulary learning through movies and TV shows with a legal content is high and that these media could also be used for teaching language patterns in an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classroom with relevant focus. Hence, watching discipline specific TV shows and movies is beneficial for both incidental learning and explicit teaching.