The use of subtitled films in teaching and learning foreign languages: vocabulary acquisition in English

Abstract This paper addresses vocabulary acquisition in English through the implementation of a pedagogic routine, which we call here didactic sequence (DS), that is oriented to be used in foreign language (FL) classes. This DS involves the work with subtitled films and written translations in a functional perspective, focusing on vocabulary acquisition in FL. In order to investigate the effectiveness of the DS, a research was conducted with a high school class from a public school in Fortaleza, Ceará. The research measured the participant’s vocabulary acquisition in English, which reached the average of 56,48% when taken from the lexical shortage (32,75%) identified in the pre-test.