Abstract

This study aims to examine the effect of video captions (on-screen text) with glosses on EFL students’ incidental business vocabulary acquisition and learning. Fifty students from College of Management participated in this study. A pretest was adopted to make sure that they lacked of familiarity with target business words. All the participants had to watch three video clips presented in three different modes (non-caption mode, captioned mode and caption-glosses mode). After each mode, all the participants took an immediate posttest and a three-week delayed posttest. Each posttest included four different types of tests: two production tests (word spelling) and two recognition tests (multiple choices). At the end of the treatment, the participants had to complete a questionnaire. The findings reveal that caption-glosses mode significantly outperformed the other two modes in the immediate and three-week delayed posttests. The retention of target business words did not significantly decline at the three-week delayed posttest. Therefore, glosses in the captioned video can assist the participants in the short and long term incidental business vocabulary retention. Moreover, the participants provided positive feedback on caption-glosses mode for incidental business word acquisition. Pedagogical implications of this study are that glosses in video captions tends to aid incident business word learning and acquisition.

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