How Watching Subtitled YouTube Videos Can Affect EFL Listening and Reading Abilities

要旨

This paper presents the results of a study that examined whether or not (1) watching English subtitled YouTube videos could help L1 Japanese EFL learners to improve on measures of listening comprehension, reading comprehension or reading speed, and (2) enjoyment, amount of time spent watching or tendency to re-watch videos affected improvement in any of these areas. The results suggest that (1) some gains were made in reading comprehension and speed, but not listening comprehension, although it is not clear how much of this is due to the class and how much is due solely to watching YouTube videos, and that (2) if students tended to watch more videos or exhibit a tendency to re-watch videos and also enjoyed them for linguistic reasons (rather than preference or content-based reasons), they tended to show more improvement in reading comprehension. Though it is unclear how successfully improvement in listening comprehension was able to be measured in this study, the results suggest that watching subtitled videos can be helpful to EFL learners' general language improvement, such as reading ability, not only listening ability, as previously thought. Furthermore, they suggest that students can enhance the benefits of watching subtitled videos by re-watching them and focusing on the language being used in them.

主題