Language driven leisure activities aid language acquisition in general, but do certain such activities promote more specific language registers, such as English for academic purposes? Using quantitative analyses, the paper investigates the relationship between upper secondary students' (N≈800) receptive academic vocabulary knowledge and their different language media activities outside school.
This study explores the possible impact of leisure activities on academic vocabulary knowledge, a critical component of academic literacy. Academic vocabulary makes up approximately 10% of the words in academic texts. Informal engagement with English, in written as well as oral modalities, is extensive in the daily life of Swedes. Such engagement frequently involves contact with English in digitally mediated contexts, offering good opportunities for acquiring English skills beyond formal language learning contexts. Previous research has confirmed that Swedish adolescents have a high general proficiency in English, often acquired through out-of-school language activities. However, little is known about how such language activities relate to their academic vocabulary knowledge. The purpose of the study is to investigate if leisure activities can offer any explanatory power to Swedish upper secondary students' receptive English academic word knowledge. An extramural English survey development including analysis of responses on different EE questions informed the final EE survey. The data for the study is based on the participants' (N≈800) scores from a word-recognition test and survey responses. The test scores offer a measure of the students' receptive academic vocabulary size. The survey collects self-reported data on their out-of-school media language activities. Regression analyses are conducted to explore the correlations between test scores and independent variables such as playing computer games, watching /subtitled/ movies, and fiction reading. The analysis also controls for impact of other variables, e.g. L1, and parental education. The results will shed light on the extent to which upper secondary student's incidental learning of academic vocabulary may be predicated on leisure activities. Additionally, the findings will be discussed in terms of how the findings may inform current pedagogical practices. Finally, the paper considers a focal shift in survey design, moving away from the medium of exposure to the genre of exposure, i.e. young people do read news, however, not only print news but also in the digital wild.
