Effect of Watching Movies With Bimodal, Standard and No-Subtitles on Incidental Learning of Formal and Informal Vocabulary

The use of movies, in which auditory and visual stimuli are combined, might be oneof the ways of providing context for vocabulary learning, hence a source forincidental vocabulary learning. however, there is a debate on the role of subtitlesand the best mode of subtitles in movies as a pedagogical tool in language learning.this study investigated the effect of watching movies with subtitles (bimodal andstandard) and without subtitles on incidental learning of formal and informalvocabulary in the classroom. to this end, 90 iranian advanced efl participants,who were selected from a lager sample and were homogenized in terms of englishproficiency and vocabulary size, were randomly assigned into three groups: (1)bimodal subtitling group (n = 30), who watched movies with english subtitlestranscribed form english dialogues, (2) standard subtitling group (n = 30), whowatched movies with persian subtitles transcribed from english dialogues, and (3)no-subtitling group (n = 30), who watched movies without subtitles. to collect thedata, a vocabulary test which consisted of 120 multiple-choice items, measuring theknowledge of formal (n = 60) and informal vocabulary (n = 60), was developed andadministered to the participants. three versions of 4 english movies (with bimodal,standard and no-subtitling) were made and each group of the study was exposed toone for 4 weeks. then, the same vocabulary test was administered to the threegroups as posttests. to analyze the data, a within-between subjects model ofanova was utilized. data analysis showed that watching movies, regardless of themode in which they were presented, improved the incidental learning of both formaland informal vocabulary. besides, the results indicated the superiority of standardsubtitled movies over bimodal and no-subtitled movies in enhancing the learners'incidental vocabulary learning. however, no significant difference between theperformance of bimodal subtitling and no-subtitling groups was found even thoughthe informal and formal vocabulary scores improved more in the former group. finally, no interaction between the subtitling mode and type of vocabulary wasfound. this study can have implications for the teachers to incorporated subtitledmovies, particularly the ones with l2 in the soundtrack and l1 in subtitles, into theirsyllabuses in the classroom.