Learning a New Language through Subtitles

Abstract

The effects of subtitling language in second language acquisition from television were examined, in the context of a learning task with subtitled spoken words in Indonesian supported by pictures. Indonesian, or L2, subtitling yielded better recall of learned items in an intentional language learning setting than Dutch, or L1, subtitling, as well as better results on a picture-sound matching task. These findings suggest that language learners benefit more from same-language subtitling than from standard subtitling when learning a language from television.