Effects of Watching English Movies on L2 Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Abstract   This study investigated the effect of watching English movies on incidental vocabulary acquisition of university students. To this end, 30 English language learners in universities were selected after a placement test. They were randomly assigned into three groups. Two experimental groups watched with and without captions respectively and one control group read captions instead. They were given the same test after the treatment. The data were gathered through the experiment, questionnaire and interview. The results indicated that captioning group significantly outperformed the others. Besides, other movie elements like genre, culture and sounds also affected participants’ performance. The implications of this study suggested that English movies could result in more incidental vocabulary acquisition of participants than reading captions as text.52715

Keywords: English movies; captions; sounds；incidental vocabulary acquisition

摘  要本文研究英语电影对英语词汇附带学习的影响。首先，对杭州师范大学69位不同专业的大学生进行了问卷调查，然后，挑选了30人进行分组实验与访谈。研究结果表明，观看有字幕电影的被试者表现最佳，测试成绩高于观看无字幕电影组和阅读组。因此，字幕对于第二语言词汇的附带习得有重要作用。此外，电影类型、文化背景，配音等要素也对词汇习得有影响。基于实证结论,提出对运用电影提高第二语言词汇学习的启示。

毕业论文关键词：英语电影；字幕；声音；词汇附带习得 

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Methodology 3

2.1 Participants 3

2.2. Instruments and materials 3

2.2.1. The placement test 3

2.2.2. Movie clips and the reading test 4

2.2.3. The test paper 4

2.3 Procedure 4

2.3.1 The Questionnaire 4

2.3.2 The Experiment 5

2.3.3 The Interview 6

2.3.4 Data analysis 6

3. Results & Discussion 6

3.1 Questionnaire analysis 6

3.2 Experiment results 7

3.3 Interview feedback 10

4. Conclusion 11

5. Appendices 13

Appendix A： 13

Appendix B： 15

Appendix C： 17

References 21

 1. Introduction

During the last decades, the advent of multimedia technologies, such as animations, videos, flash stories and movies have helped to make instructional materials more easily accessible because these technologies can add multiple modes that can draw learners’ attention for second language acquisition. There is a tendency toward using multimedia as a significant supplement for educators to help students facilitate vocabulary acquisition (Mousavi &Gholami, 2014). Watching movies is the best example. Several studies have testified the value of movies in language learning and teaching. To be specific, movies can supply a large amount of SL/FL aural and visual input in a short time and enable learners to use audio-visual-oral information to enhance comprehension (Chapple & Curtis, 2000; Barza & Memari, 2014).  This is based on the fact that movies provide learners with exposure to “real language”, used in authentic settings and in the cultural context where the foreign language is spoken (Barza & Memari, 2014). Purushotma (2005) claims that funny media resources such as animations, videos and flash stories cannot only be used for entertainment, but also be educational for language learners. So learners can merge educational goals with entertainment content. Most of these studies found that movies are powerful instructional materials in improving reading and listening comprehension skills. Moreover, several empirical studies have focused on the effects of watching subtitled films on comprehension in vocabulary acquisition. Meta-analysis reveals a large superiority of captioned animation in that captioning groups significantly outperformed the control group on both listening and vocabulary posttests (Perez, Noortgate & Desmet, 2013). Neuman and Koskinen’s experiment (1992) shows that the group that watched a scientific television program with subtitle incidentally acquired more words than either of the other two treatment groups and the control group. Similar empirical studies which investigate the effects of captioned and non-captioned movies or programs on incidental acquisition (Garza, 1991; Danan, 1992, 2004; Neuman & Koskinen, 1992; Markham, 1993, 1999; Baltova, 1999) find that subtitles are necessary for language learners to reason and understand unknown words. Furthermore, English movies have already been used in classroom which can facilitate students’ incidental vocabulary acquisition by providing multi-sensory information (Barza & Memari, 2014). However, there are different voices. Some studies (Mousavi & Gholami, 2014) indicate that there is not a significant effect on incidental vocabulary acquisition between with and without captions groups according to their experiment. That is, some other factors also affect second language vocabulary acquisition. Barza and Memari (2014) report that many factors about movie genre, culture and content should be taken into account while satisfying different main bodies. Besides, scenes, sounds (dialogues) and roles of English films can create a real environment which gives contextual clues to help learners to guess the meaning from captions. Thus, the impact of different factors of watching movies on vocabulary acquisition should be emphasized, such as the potential of captions, sounds, genre and culture of movies. The results can encourage movies to play a more effective role in vocabulary acquisition.