Exploring repeated captioning viewing as a way to promote vocabulary learning: time lag between repetitions and learner factors.

Repeated viewing of the same video is a common strategy among autonomous language learners as well as a much used pedagogical strategy among foreign language (FL) teachers. Learners may watch the same video more than once, to increase global comprehension of the target language or to focus their attention on linguistic aspects, such as new vocabulary or pronunciation. This study sought to examine to what extent repetition is more efficient for vocabulary learning if the second viewing follows the first immediately, or a week later. Participants were upper intermediate-level college learners who were distributed into three groups, one watched a TV series episode twice in the same session, one also watched the same episode twice but one week apart, and the last (control) group did not watch the video. Tests of word meaning recognition and word meaning recall were administered before and after viewing (pretest-immediate posttest-delayed posttest). The pretest and posttests contained 23 target items and 17 distracters (single words and multi-word expressions). In addition, the study explored the influence of two learner factors, each related to one of two verbal input channels: sound recognition for the audio and reading efficacy (reading speed and comprehension) for the onscreen text. The results indicated significant vocabulary learning from viewing and slightly higher benefits for the spaced repetition group at immediate posttest. The results also showed a significant influence of previous target vocabulary knowledge and of aptitude, as measured by the LLAMA D test, but not of reading efficacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]