Vocabulary has long been an important issue in English as a foreign language learning and in academic disciplines but scant attention has been paid to vocabulary learning in English Medium Instruction (EMI) contexts. In this exploratory study, vocabulary learning in the social sciences was investigated from the perspective of first-year undergraduate students in Turkey. An open-ended questionnaire was administered to 161 freshmen majoring in International Relations and Philosophy. The findings suggest that students tended to remember vocabulary for reasons pertaining to the characteristics of the lecture, the lecturers’ delivery style, to the characteristics of the students themselves and to the nature of the lexical items they were exposed to during their lectures. Some recommendations are suggested to inform lecture delivery in EMI contexts.

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