Promoting incidental vocabulary learning through watching a French Netflix series with glossed captions

Abstract

This paper investigates the effects of watching an entire season of a French series with the streaming service Netflix in an out-of-classroom context. University Dutch-speaking low- to high-intermediate learners of French were divided into two groups: a control group who only took the tests (N = 37) and a treatment group (N = 65). Learners in the treatment group watched six episodes with glossed captions provided by the Chrome extension Language Learning with Netflix (i.e., they could access the meaning of the words in the captions whenever they wanted) within a maximum of 21 days. We examined learners' incidental vocabulary learning gains by means of a form and meaning recall test and also analysed learning gains in relation to different variables: word-related factors, the use of glossed captions and learners' vocabulary size. Results revealed that participants recalled approximately 35% of the word meanings and 28% of the word forms. Besides, learning gains were positively influenced by the use of the glossed captions as well as vocabulary size scores. Findings also demonstrated that frequency of occurrence positively impacted learning gains, especially when target words appeared more concentrated in one episode rather than across different ones.