Stuart Webb

After completing his undergraduate degree at Western, Stuart Webb did an MA in TESL/TEFL at the University of Birmingham, and a PhD in Applied Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington. Prior to joining the Faculty of Education at Western University in 2015, he taught English as a foreign language in China and Japan for many years, and more recently taught Applied Linguistics and TESOL for graduate programs in Japan, Singapore, and New Zealand.Stuart conducts research on second language acquisition, particularly incidental vocabulary learning through reading, listening, and watching television, as well as how words can be taught effectively. His research has investigated the teaching and learning of both single-word items and collocations and has looked at questions such as: How many words do English as a foreign language students learn per year? How many words do we need to know to understand television programs and movies? How many times do we need to encounter words during reading in order to learn them? Which words have the greatest value to learners and deserve attention in the classroom? How can we measure vocabulary learning? His research has included corpus-driven studies of the vocabulary in different discourse types and quantitative studies of vocabulary learning. His work has appeared in journals such as Applied Linguistics, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Language Learning, and TESOL Quarterly.  He is co-author (with Paul Nation) of Researching and Analyzing Vocabulary (Heinle, 2011) and serves on the editorial boards of a number of international Applied Linguistics and TESOL journals.