Abstract:

The focus of the study was to find out the effect of watching subtitled documentary videos on EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners’ vocabulary learning. To this end, 90 intermediate students (male and female) were randomly selected based on a proficiency test. Next, they were randomly assigned to two experimental groups and one control group. Participants took a pre-test. After 12 L2 treatment sessions where each group watched the video clips, 1 experimental group watched the clips with L1 subtitles and the other group with L2 subtitles and the control group with no subtitles, the post-test was conducted. Then, one-way analysis of variance was conducted to find out if there were any differences between the post-test performances of three groups. The results showed that participants in the L2 subtitled group and L1 subtitled group performed significantly better than unsubtitled group. The L2 subtitled group (mean = 16.97) performed better, but not significantly than the L1 subtitled group (mean = 16.56). The findings contribute to EFL learners, teachers and the Ministry of Education.   Keywords: Documentary, video subtitling, listening, vocabulary learning, L1 subtitling, L2 subtitling;

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