In this corpus driven study, the scripts of 143 movies consisting of 1,267,236
running words were analyzed using the RANGE program (Heatley et al. 2002)
to determine the number of encounters with low frequency words. Low frequency
words were operationalized as items from Nation’s (2004) 4th to 14th
1,000-word BNC lists. The results showed that in a single movie, few words were
encountered 10 or more times indicating that only a small number of words may
be learned through watching one movie. However, as the number of movies analyzed
increased, the number of words encountered 10 or more times increased.
Twenty-three percent of the word families from Nation’s (2004) 4th 1,000-word
list were encountered 10 or more times in a set of 70 movies. This indicates that
if learners watch movies regularly over a long period of time, there is the potential
for significant incidental learning to occur.