ANALYZING THE LEXICAL DENSITY OF SPECIALIZED PODCASTS FOR ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES: A CORPUS BASED STUDY
Keywords:
Lexical Density, Corpus, Podcasts, Nouns, Verbs, Pronouns, Adjectives, AdverbsAbstract
This study examines the lexical density and linguistic characteristics of specialized podcasts in the fields of business, science and technology, and history using English for Specific Purposes (ESP) frameworks. As part of a corpus-based quantitative study to determine the distribution of parts-of-speech and lexical density, 360 podcast episode transcripts totaling approximately 2.8 million words were examined with the help of the Analyse My Writing tool. History has the highest lexical density (48.19%), followed by business (45.19%) and science and technology (44.96%), according to the findings. General speech has a lower lexical density overall. Domain-specific patterns can be seen in the parts-of-speech analysis: nouns and prepositions predominate in history, verbs and pronouns predominate in business, and adjectives and adverbs predominate in science and technology. These results show that ESP podcasts give learners authentic and lexically sufficient input by combining aspects of spoken and written language. The study highlights the pedagogical benefits of podcasts as adaptable and discipline-specific resources for improving listening comprehension, vocabulary, and professional communication skills.
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