Kijkend Leren: Een Onderzoek Naar Het Leren Van Woorden in Een Vreemde Taal Via de Televisie

The research reported on in this paper concerns the role of television in the lexical acquisition of a foreign language. Twenty higher educated adult learners of Dutch as a foreign language watched a 15-minute compilation of the educative television programs Klokhuis and Lucht. By means of a pre-post-test-design, it was examined whether the subjects learned words by watching and listening to the television programs.The results indicated a significant learning effect, which persisted after a one-week time interval. There was also a tendency for the learning effect in the ten students who watched with explicit word-learning instruction (intentional learning) to be stronger than the learning effect in the students who watched without instruction (incidental learning). The learnability of a word was neither positively influenced by the visual support as extra contextual cue, as offered by television, nor by the number of times a word was offered in the television fragments.It was concluded that television could play an important role in the lexical acquisition of Dutch as a foreign language.