Abstract

This study examines Italian university students’ knowledge of English for Sports as a specialised subset of ESP, exploring how general proficiency, personal engagement with sport and exposure to English-language sports media shape both general and domain-specific lexical competence. 87 students (MA Languages; BA Economics) completed a questionnaire on media habits, a General Vocabulary Size Test, and a 60-item Sports VST. Moreover, a longitudinal sub-study tracked 12 MA students over one year through written production tasks and targeted retrieval tests. Results show that general vocabulary breadth is strongly associated with CEFR proficiency, whereas sports-specific vocabulary is largely predicted by exposure to English sports media and, to a lesser extent, by engagement in sport. BA Economics students, despite lower overall proficiency, outperform MA Language students on the Sports VST due to higher media-based exposure. A longitudinal analysis of language students’ performance reveals improvements in grammatical accuracy but minimal growth in specialised vocabulary, indicating that English for Sports does not develop incidentally in the absence of sustained, domain-rich input. These findings highlight the need for ESP pedagogies that integrate learners’ informal media practices to foster specialised lexical development.

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