Dissertation project

The Impacts of Storytelling and Video Subtitles on EFL High School Students’ Vocabulary Learning

Linguistic input is an integral part of the language learning, in second and foreign language learning in particular. It is the sources of the language to which the learner is exposed, and it may originate from various sources such as teachers, classmates, books, T.V and so forth. One of its modern and effective types of input based on recent extensive studies is audiovisual input. This type of input is the combination of audio or sound and visuals such as pictures. Since it is one of the crucial types of inputs for second language vocabulary learning according to various learning theories, this study is going to focus on it. To specify, this study will focus on if audiovisual input , captioned videos exclusively have a positive effect on incidental vocabulary learning of a very basic level foreign language learners. For this purpose, a number of sixty high school , age of 17-19 years old , bilingual speakers of Pashto and Dari , and Pre-A1 level of English as a foreign language proficiency are going to participate in this experimental study. The study will consist of 60 participants of two , control and experimental groups while each group containing 30 participants . They will be selected based on convenient sampling. The experimental group is going to be exposed to a captioned video of Rita F. Pierson TED Talk with captions in second language for two times in a period of one hour, and the control group will be exposed to the same video without any captions or subtitles with the same amount of exposure. A total number of 10 target items will be extracted from the video as words the participants will be not familiar with before. After the treatment, both groups will be tested for the ten target words. The results will be then analyzed through SPSS for two-way ANOVA.