Vocabulary acquisition through a subtitled movie clip among university students of UiTM Melaka / Noor Alina Namami

This study is to examine whether the use of standard subtitles helps second language learners to acquire
new vocabulary in the target language significantly in Malaysian context. Additionally, this research was
conducted to study the differences between watching movie clip with subtitles, and movie clip with no
subtitles among second language university students and their rates of vocabulary acquisition. The
research design was a quasi- experimental design, which used the Wesche & Paribakht’s (1996)
Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (VKS) in order to measure the rates of vocabulary acquisition of the
participants before and after they have watched the movie clip provided. The independent variable for
this study was the movie clip and the subtitles, whereas, the dependent variable would be the rates of
acquisition of the participants. Data obtained from the study were analysed using the descriptive statistics
in SPSS Version 17 in comparing the means concerning to address the first research question. For the
second research question, the researcher used One Sample T-test to compare the gains and the difference
between control and treatment group, and Paired Samples T-test to measure the significance difference
between control and treatment group. The findings of this study revealed that the treatment group gained
slightly better in terms of vocabulary acquisition as compared to the control group that had watched the
movie clip with no subtitles. Moreover, the relationship between the subtitles and the rates of acquisition
was found significant for the Treatment group and Control group also showed improvement during the
post-test though it is not significant. Pedagogical implications are offered along with suggestions for
further research.