L 2 Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through Extensive Listening to Podcasts

During my first semester of teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL) I had five hundred students. I taught ten sections of Advanced English at the University of Science and Technology in Beijing, China. Each section had fifty students, whom I met with for one and a half hours once a week. The main goal of the course was to help undergraduates with advanced English proficiency pass the College English Test, a university exit requirement for all undergraduates in China. A secondary goal of the course was to prepare students for graduate study in Englishspeaking academic environments, since a majority of them would eventually go on to graduate studies in the U.S., England, or Australia. Constrained by time and large class sizes, I struggled with ways to provide enough meaningful input and practice for my students. Moreover, my students came from all different academic fields, ranging from computer science to philosophy to sports management. It would have been impossible to teach five hundred students the field-specific vocabulary each of them would need for their graduate studies. I did the best I could to make our class time meaningful, but my students constantly asked me the best way to learn academic vocabulary outside of class. As a novice teacher at the time, I did not have a good answer for them. In their free time, many of them watched English movies and listened to music on the Internet or through their smartphones and iPods. Some students even chose to watch or listen to academic lectures from American universities. I encouraged them to keep doing what they were doing outside of class. Of the students who did this extensive listening outside of class, many felt discouraged because they did not know enough vocabulary to understand the lectures or found it difficult to catch all of the words while listening to authentic materials. This led them to question whether or not they could actually study abroad at an English-speaking university. These conversations with my students were frustrating because I did not see how I could help them with so few class hours and such large classes. Similar challenges surfaced again during my teaching practicum at the Community English Program (CEP) at Teachers College, Columbia University. I co-taught a ten-week long course called Advanced Studies, which was the highest level of English as a second language (ESL) offered by the CEP. The course was unique in that it was the only CEP course without a pre-determined curriculum. Instead, the Advanced Studies teachers were expected to create a curriculum based on the students’ needs. The course met three evenings per week for two hours each time. The majority of our students were visiting scholars in graduate programs at Columbia