Suitability of TED-Ed animations for academic listening

Amid increasing demand for EAP courses, there is a pressing need to identify suitable materials for EAP instruction. This study examines the suitability of TED-Ed animations for academic listening by exploring the lexical demands, academic vocabulary coverage, lexical density, and speech rates of a corpus of 1,319 such animations covering 12 subject areas. The results show that knowledge of the most frequent 3,000–5,000 word families is necessary to follow TED-Ed animations reasonably well, meaning that they are lexically more demanding than academic lectures. The animations were also found to have a coverage of lower-frequency academic words comparable to that of academic lectures, making the former a potentially important resource in which EAP students can encounter important academic words that are seldom used in general English. Moreover, the speech rate of TED-Ed animations is comparable to that of academic lectures, but they are lexically denser, suggesting that – while they may be useful for familiarizing learners with the delivery pace of academic lectures – additional vocabulary support may be needed. Overall, these results support the use of TED-Ed animations as materials for academic listening, but adequate scaffolding and some adjustments will be needed if they are to be integrated effectively into EAP instruction.