Effect Of Word Frequency And Subtitles On English As A Foreign Language (EFL) Vocabulary Acquisition And Reading Comprehension

The subtitle is one of powerful tools to have better performance in learning foreign language as well as word frequency which effectively determines successful of reading subtitle since word frequency is also one of the linguistic factor of language processing The basic idea of this research is to investigate the effect of types of subtitle with word frequency(high or low)and the interaction effect between two factors on vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehensionThe current study uses the theory of language acquisition and development by Stephen Krashen(1987)and dual coding theory by Paivio(1971).An experimental study with a 2(word frequency:High or low)× 3(subtitle:caption,reverse subtitle,and standard subtitle)was used.181 university students involved in the study,108 participants were first year student and 73 of them were second year student.They were in age range between 18-20 years old.Participants assigned in 1 out to 6 groups.The experiment material consisted of 24 videos in total,with six videos for each condition,and vocabulary and comprehension test.The finding revealed that word frequency significantly affected vocabulary acquisition as well as reading comprehension.Likewise,another variable,subtitles significantly affected vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension.The interaction effect of word frequency and subtitles occurred on vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension.Furthermore,simple main effect of vocabulary acquisition clarified that comparison of subtitles in high and low frequency significantly different,as well as high frequency in caption compared to standard subtitle and low frequency in caption compared to standard subtitle and low frequency in caption compared to reverse subtitle.In reading comprehension,the significant simple main effects were found in all type of subtitles with high and low frequency,high frequency in caption compared to standard subtitle and high frequency in standard subtitle compared to reverse subtitle as well as low frequency in caption compared to standard subtitle and low frequency in caption compared to reverse subtitle.