Abstract

The drama fever has been riding high with consumer usage of over-the-top (OTT) streaming services on the rise and the prevalence of mobile devices with Internet connectivity. The researcher-teacher sometimes overhears her students chatting about the drama series they binge-watch. Given this binge-watching phenomenon on college campuses in Taiwan, where Mandarin is an official language and English as a foreign language (EFL) is a required course, the researcher-teacher is concerned about English lexical growth if Taiwanese students’ viewing habits shift from Mandarin to English subtitles. Deriving from Mandarin drama English subtitles, the researcher sought to create a list of the most frequent multiword expressions for students to learn because drama lines are often drawn from daily life and even reflect current events. A corpus of 8.46 million English-subtitled words from 50 Mandarin dramas across different genres was compiled, totaling 1,427 episodes. Based on frequency, dispersion and expert judgments, a total of 475 frequent multiword expressions were selected. Pedagogical implications and directions for future research are also discussed in the study.

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