Watching Captioned Authentic Videos for Incidental Vocabulary Learning: Is It Effective?

Ekaterina Sinyashina

doi:10.35360/njes.539

Abstract

This article examines the effectiveness of watching captioned authentic videos for incidental vocabulary learning by comparing it to intentional learning of new lexis through a set of tasks and a control group. For this purpose, 32 Spanish learners of English were distributed among three groups: intentional, incidental and control. The intentional group took part in a one-hour classroom teaching session, whereas the participants from the incidental group were exposed to 5 hours of captioned authentic video. The control group was used as a reference. The performance of the three groups was compared in three vocabulary tests, which were developed to measure the learning of three different aspects of word knowledge: form recognition, meaning recognition and written use in a sentence. While no significant difference was observed between the performance of the incidental group and the control one, the intentional group demonstrated considerably higher scores in the three vocabulary tests. The effectiveness of incidental vocabulary learning through watching 5 hours of captioned authentic videos is discussed in terms of the variables that could have affected the learning process.

Highlights

Vocabulary is an indispensable part of target language (TL) learning because “words are the main carrier of information and conceptual knowledge” (Baltova 1999: 16)
In the form recognition test, almost 93% of the participants from the intentional group answered correctly the multiple-choice test, whereas the subjects from the incidental and control groups managed to recognise the forms of 65% and 61.1% of the target words respectively
The aim of this paper was to examine the effectiveness of watching captioned authentic videos for incidental vocabulary learning

Summary

Introduction

Vocabulary is an indispensable part of target language (TL) learning because “words are the main carrier of information and conceptual knowledge” (Baltova 1999: 16). New vocabulary can be acquired intentionally or incidentally while being exposed to some kind of input in the TL. Nowadays, subtitled/captioned authentic videos can be considered a valuable source of input for incidental new vocabulary learning. They provide verbal and non-verbal stimuli, which can help to improve the processing of information (Paivio 1991; Sadoski 2005). Apart from giving an opportunity for observing target language in a diversity of communicative contexts (Harmer 2003; Lin and Siyanova-Chanturia 2014), authentic videos can have a strong

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