The Vocabulary Demands of Popular English Songs

Abstract

Popular music is ever-present and widely available in students’ lives and the value of it as a factor in the language learning process has been a part of the pedagogical literature for many years. One of the often-discussed benefits is the potential for vocabulary learning through songs; however, few researchers have examined whether songs are a suitable source of input for vocabulary learning for English language learners. To address this need, this corpus-driven study investigated the vocabulary demands of popular English songs. A comprehensive corpus of popular English song lyrics was created for this study. Songs for the corpus were selected according to their impact and influence on culture. A song’s impact on culture was determined by its ranking from experts in the music industries in the United States and the United Kingdom and by its popularity based on radio airplay, sales data, and streaming data in the United States and sales and streaming data in the United Kingdom. The corpus contained 2,175 songs and 678,309 tokens. The total listening time was 135 hours and 22 minutes. The lyrics in the corpus were analyzed to determine the vocabulary size necessary to reach 95% and 98% coverage of the words in songs. The songs in the corpus were divided into two varieties of English—American and British, six decades—1950s to 2000s, and four genres—Urban Roots, Formative Rock, Progressive Rock, and Mainstream Listening. An analysis was first completed over the whole corpus and then over the songs from each variety of English, decade, and genre. This study also examined the potential to incidentally learn vocabulary from listening to songs and whether songs are more similar to spoken or written discourse. The results showed that knowledge of the most frequent 2,000 word families, proper nouns, and marginal words provided 96.05% coverage, and knowledge of the most frequent 5,000 word families, proper nouns, and marginal words provided 98% coverage of songs. Both American and British songs reached 95% coverage at the 2,000 word frequency level. However, the British songs reached 98% coverage at the 5,000 word frequency level, while the American songs reached 98% coverage at the 6,000 word frequency level. A vocabulary of the most frequent 2,000 word families, proper nouns, and marginal words was sufficient to reach 95% coverage in all six decades. However, the vocabulary size needed to reach 98% coverage in the six decades ranged from the most frequent 4,000 to 8,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words. A vocabulary of the most frequent 2,000 word families, proper nouns, and marginal words was adequate to reach 95% coverage in all four genre categories. However, the vocabulary size necessary to reach 98% coverage in the different genres ranged from the most frequent 5,000 to 6,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words. The results indicated that there would be a relatively low number of meetings of the same low-frequency word families if learners listened to a small or large number of popular songs. However, there would be a relatively high number of encounters of the same mid-frequency and high-frequency word families if learners listened to a large number of popular songs. This result suggests that there is a greater potential for incidental vocabulary learning of mid-frequency and high-frequency vocabulary through songs. Lastly, in terms of vocabulary, songs are more similar to unscripted spoken discourse than written discourse. Overall, the findings indicate that songs have the potential to be an appropriate source of input for English language learners and might be beneficial for incidental vocabulary learning, especially when listening to a large number of songs. This study provides insights into the kinds of vocabulary used in popular songs and suggests implications for teaching and learning with songs.