Eye tracking study suggests movie subtitles as language learning tool

Have you ever attempted learning a second language but it just didn’t click for you? An eye tracking study may show you why your methods weren’t working.

Researchers from Michigan State University and Portland State University recruited English speaking students in their 4^th semester  of Russian, Chinese, Spanish or Arabic language study and used eye tracking technology to analyze where the students looked during a film subtitled in their second language.

One of the reasons the team chose to look at captioned video is because teaching with videos in foreign language lessons has been shown to increase students’ understanding of the language when they have more context to what is being said.

Previous studies done with video captioning have shown that captions give viewers an additional way to visualize the information being heard so it can potentially help them understand something even slightly above their skill level.

The team found that participants looked at the captions on average 68% of the time and that Arabic language students looked at captions significantly more than students studying Russian and Spanish. Students learning Chinese tended to look at the captions more when they weren’t familiar with the video content and less when they were familiar.

One of the limitations of the study is that the researchers didn’t have any knowledge of the students’ second language reading capabilities.

The potential application of these findings is developing learning tools, which are more precisely and efficiently designed for learning a second language. The research suggests that captions are especially helpful to students who are learning a language that is written much differently than their first language.

What else do you think eye tracking could tell us about how we learn different languages? Let us know below!

 

Read about the entire experiment here.