The impact of subtitles in second language acquisition : an experimental study on Norwegian upper secondary students
Master thesis
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http://hdl.handle.net/11250/2403669Utgivelsesdato
2016Metadata
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Sammendrag
In this study, we sought to find and measure the long-term effects of subtitled second language audiovisual material on second language acquisition, and how significant the potential effects were. The participants of this study were students from a VG3 level in upper secondary school class who were divided into three groups. Two of these groups were experimental groups who watched four episodes of Family Guy with either English or Norwegian subtitles, while the third group, being a control group, watched the material without any subtitles. This master’s project has been a continuation of Ingrid Elisabeth Nufsfjord Kvitnes and Lisa Marie Grønn Aurstad’s theses on the short term effects of subtitles in second language acquisition. This study looks more extensively on the long-term effects in the same area.
We found that viewing intralingual subtitles, in this case English, benefitted students on word recall aptitude, and that vocabulary and grammar proficiency had an effect on word definition skill. Furthermore, we established that word frequency was a predicator for accuracy on the lexical recall task, showing that higher frequent words are more easily recalled after a longer period of time after being exposed to the material (circa 1 month) than lower frequent words. An additional finding was that both proficiency with vocabulary and grammar were linked to word definition ability, meaning higher expertise with vocabulary and grammar establish better scores on word definition tasks.