A case study of learning English through a Netflix movie

This study aims to investigate what Thai adults can learn from watching movies with English spoken language. Furthermore, it seeks to answer whether English subtitles help adults understand these movies’ content to a greater extent. It was conducted using a focus group research type, which resulted in four participants joining. These participants, aged between 25 and 25, fell into the category of young adults who do not have any background with the English language during their bachelor’s degree studies or daily lives. To conduct this research, tests were set up before and after a viewing of the chosen movie, and afterwards an interview was held with all participants. The pre movie test was set up with 15 vocabulary questions aiming to gauge the participants’ knowledge beforehand. The post movie test was set up using the same, shuffled, 15 vocabulary questions and a comprehension test to gauge the attention given to the movie by the participants. This was finalized by an interview, used to gather the participants’ opinions and findings regarding their experience with the English audio and subtitles of the movie. The test results clearly demonstrated a significant improvement, with a positive increase of 22% from the pre-test to the post-test. Additionally, the participants achieved near-perfect scores in the comprehension test, further solidifying the evidence of the positive impact of movies on vocabulary knowledge. The interview responses further supported these findings, as participants expressed that watching the movie with subtitles specifically contributed to their improved post-test scores and overall understanding of the English content. These research outcomes provide additional evidence in support of previous studies on the influence of movies on language learning, particularly among individuals not directly involved in language studies.