Learning vocabulary with the support of sustained exposure to captioned video: do proficiency and aptitude make a difference?

ABSTRACT

Video viewing can be a valuable resource to expose students to large quantities of input so they can improve their vocabulary and content comprehension. Most studies so far have used short clips and have not explored in much detail the effects of individual differences (IDs) such as aptitude, listening skills and vocabulary size. This paper aims to address this gap by exposing 57 Grade-10 EFL learners and 60 university students to captioned video. On a weekly basis over an academic term, all learners were pre-taught a set of target words (TWs); half of them (the experimental group) were additionally shown captioned episodes from a TV series containing the TWs. All learners were pre- and post-tested on the TW forms and meanings. Results revealed significant differences between experimental and control groups in the learning of TWs in the high school population, but not among university participants. A main effect for proficiency was observed on the learning scores for both TW forms and meanings. However, language aptitude was only a significant factor for TW meanings. Results are discussed regarding how video viewing and these IDs mediate vocabulary learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Captioned video viewing
• vocabulary learning
• language aptitude
• vocabulary size
• listening skills

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitivity. The authors would also like to thank Joan Borràs-Comes and the anonymous reviewers and Guest Editors for their valuable feedback and advice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Maria del Mar Suárez http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1741-7596

Ferran Gesa http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1775-3212

Notes

1 Named after the Gospel according to Matthew in the New Testament: ‘For to those who have, more will be given, and they have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away’ (Matthew 13:12, New Revised Standard Version Bible).

2 By teacher-led instruction we understand pre-teaching the TW forms and meanings through a focus-on-forms vocabulary task at the beginning of the class (for both experimental and control groups) and the administration of a vocabulary post-task after viewing the episode (experimental group) or at the end of class (control group).

3 Throughout the paper, multimodal input is understood as the simultaneous presentation of L2 text (subtitles), L2 sound (soundtrack) and video image.

4 In this paper, L2 subtitles and captions will be used interchangeably.

5 Interestingly, some aptitude component tests which, per se, might not be expected to be related to vocabulary - e.g. the Language Analytic Ability test of the Pimsleur Language Aptitude test (PLAB) (Pimsleur, Reed, and Stansfield 2004) - have been found to associate with differences in L2 vocabulary size, though not in L1 vocabulary size (Dąbrowska 2019).

6 If all the meanings had been accepted on the pre- and post-tests, it would not have been possible to know whether participants learned them thanks to the TV series or for any other reason.

7 For this correspondence, only the scores of the X_Lex test were taken into account as Meara and Milton (2003), Milton (2010) and Milton and Alexiou (2009) did not administer the Y_Lex test. As seen in Table 3, the total score of both vocabulary size tests was 4,415 words for the university group and 3,475 for high-schoolers.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitivity for the project ‘La versión original y la exposición extraescolar en el aprendizaje del inglés. El efecto de la edad, nivel de dominio y diferencias cognitivas’ [FFI2013-47616-P] and for a predoctoral research grant to the second author [BES-2014-068089].