Incidental colloquial vocabulary and phrases learning in an EFL communicative-based classroom : effects of captioned sitcoms and students’ attitudes

Abstract

This dissertation aims to investigate the effectiveness of captioned videos and communicative-based tasks in colloquial vocabulary learning. To conceptualize appropriate pedagogical designs, participants’ attitudes and feedback towards these two approaches were also collected. Fifty participants recruited from a local university in mainland China were assigned into three groups, in which they received different inventions: 1) captioned sitcom viewing; 2) captioned sitcom viewing + communicative-based tasks, and 3) no intervention. The learning outcomes were evaluated from the perspectives of receptive and productive skills, with assessments of aural form recognition, written form recall, sentence making and meaning recognition. The results showed participants could obtain significant improvements in receptive knowledge of colloquial vocabulary through captioned sitcom viewing, but their productive knowledge remained underdeveloped. Additional communicative-based tasks played positive roles in eliciting certain advancements in productive skills. Participants who received the additional intervention of communicative-based tasks achieved significant gains in the form recall task, but did not achieve significant improvements in sentencemaking tasks. Participants in the two experimental groups exhibited positive attitudes towards these two approaches and reported valuable feedback for the conceptualization of pedagogical design.