Incidental Vocabulary Learning from Audiovisual Input: The Case of Pre-Intermediate Turkish EFL Learners

Abstract

Audiovisual input has drawn great interest from scholars with an increase in streaming services and extramural language activities. A vast amount of research suggests that language learning from such audiovisual resources is possible. Despite the plethora of studies, however, few have recruited lower-level learners, i.e., A1 & A2. This study, therefore, seeks to fill this gap by investigating whether audiovisual input is conducive to incidental vocabulary learning for high A2 & low B1 Turkish learners of English and whether captions (L2 subtitles) help gain more vocabulary compared to non-captioned viewing. To this end, thirty-nine pre-intermediate university students watched a short video about volcanoes under two viewing conditions: L2 captions and no captions. The participants’ knowledge of 23 target items at the form recognition and meaning recall levels was tested before and after the video viewing. The results showed that both groups significantly improved their scores in both tests. Furthermore, the L2 captions group significantly outscored the non-captioning group in the meaning recall test after controlling for the pre-test scores. The results altogether imply that it might be more beneficial for learners to exploit multimodal input, rather than bimodal input. Potential pedagogical implications are discussed in light of the findings.