Kijkend Leren

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.