L2 Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through Extensive Listening to Podcasts

Abstract

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.