Does comprehension of L2 television programs improve through regular classroom viewing?

Abstract

This study investigated second language (L2) comprehension across nine episodes of the same TV series and explored whether comprehension improves through regular classroom viewing. 121 intermediate and advanced EFL learners viewed the series under two conditions: captioned and uncaptioned. Significant differences in comprehension across episodes for both conditions were found. While there was an increase in comprehension from the first to the last episode, the improvement was not linear, and large variability in comprehension scores indicated that comprehension may be contingent to individual episodes. This suggests that the findings of studies investigating the comprehension of one episode of a TV program may not reflect the comprehensibility of related and unrelated programs. Moreover, it suggests that comprehensibility of one episode of a TV program, may not occur to the same degree in the next episode. Results also confirm earlier findings indicating significantly better comprehension when viewing with captions than without captions, and that learners with greater vocabulary knowledge achieve higher comprehension rates, regardless of the viewing condition. Lexical coverage, used as an indicator of lexical difficulty of the episodes, was negatively correlated with comprehension scores, suggesting that other factors such as prior vocabulary knowledge may be better predictors of viewing comprehension.