Experimental Study Regarding English as a Second Language for College Students in Turkey

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The study conducted by Yuksel and Tanriverdi in 2009 had one main purpose. The aim of the study was to determine the effects of watching an English captioned video clip on University level students who were learning English as a foreign language. More specifically the study wanted to investigate “how English language material with or without English language captions would affect vocabulary development of the foreign language learners in a Turkish university setting”.
Sample
There were 120 students who participated in this study, all of whom attended Kocaeli University in Turkey. Before starting their undergraduate degree, the participants took 20 hours of English courses a week and attended 80% of the classes. The participants had a wide variety of majors, some including Finance, Business Administration, Education, or Journalism. All of the participants were recent high school graduates and were at similar English proficiency levels (Intermediate). This was determined by a proficiency test that tested on reading comprehension, vocabulary, grammar, and writing. The participants were randomly assigned to the captions or no-captions groups. During the study 14 of the students failed to take one of the tests or the treatment therefore their results were removed from the study. The study was conducted with 104 participants; 53 students in the captions group and 51 students in the no-captions group.
Methods and Procedures
The study was measured using a pre-test, a post-test, and a control group. The students were randomly split into two groups. The participants in Group A watched the movie clip with captions, while Group B watched the movie clip without captions. Each group was given the same pre and post test (Vocabulary Knowl...

... middle of paper ...

...s answer was inaccurate they were marked down a level.
Results and Discussion
The study conducted by Yuksel and Tanriverdi found that while both groups A and B improved from pretest to posttest, the students in Group A preformed better. The students in Group A improved on an average of .91221 from pretest to posttest. The students in Group B did not perform as well, improving on average of .82168 from pretest to posttest. While Group A tested slightly better than Group B the t-test results found no statistical significant difference between the two groups.
Before the test began the participants initial knowledge of the ten target words was similar at slightly below Level II on the Vocabulary Knowledge Scale. After watching the Seinfeld clip twice both group A and B improved to above Level II. The posttest average for Group A was 2.7679 and Group B was 2.5650.

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