Effects Of Subtitling Types On English Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Of Non-English Majors

Second language video materials,as a multimodal audiovisual input with dynamic image,sound and subtitles,have been widely used in high school and college English textbooks.Incidental vocabulary acquisition(IVA)through watching videos has gradually attracted researchers’ attention.Most studies have confirmed that subtitling could promote vocabulary acquisition.However,there was no consensus on which subtitling type has the best effect.Therefore,this study aimed to answer the following questions:(1)What are the effects of different subtitling types on non-English majors’ incidental vocabulary acquisition in the immediate and delayed tests?(2)What are the effects of different subtitling types on IVA of non-English majors with different vocabulary levels in the immediate and delayed tests?Based on previous studies,this study selected the part of documentary A Plastic Whale and the viewing section of Unit 4,Book 1 of the Over to You: Viewing,Listening & Speaking textbook as the experimental material,and took four classes of non-English major freshmen as the research subjects that were further divided into higher and lower vocabulary levels based on the scores of the vocabulary level test paper.Subjects in the four classes respectively watched videos with Chinese subtitles(CS),English subtitles(ES),Chinese and English subtitles(CES),and no subtitles(NS).The modified vocabulary knowledge scale was used as the immediate and delayed vocabulary test instruments to detect the vocabulary acquired from the target video.Through experimental data analysis,this study confirmed that(1)Subjects who watched English videos could incidentally acquire vocabulary.Videos with subtitles had a more positive effect on IVA.The video with CES was the most effective on vocabulary acquisition but the video with NS had little help.The video with ES had similar vocabulary acquisition effects to the video with CS.(2)Subjects with higher vocabulary level acquired more vocabulary.For subjects at both vocabulary levels,CES group performed best on IVA,while NS group was the worst.The acquisition effect of CS was better than ES for subjects at higher vocabulary level.English subtitles had more significant acquisition effect than Chinese subtitles for subjects at lower vocabulary level.The study enriched the research on the effect of subtitling types on IVA of non-English majors.It also had certain reference value and practical significance for English video teaching and learning.