2. Use of videos to avoid interlingual and intralingual errors in terms of vocabulary:

During English language learning in in EFL contexts, there seems to be some interlingual or intralingual errors that learners commit while using the target language vocabulary. Interlangual errors are errors attributed to the native language. They are very frequent at the initial stages of L2 learning since the L1 is the only language system the learner knows and can draw on and therefore negative transfer takes place (Brown, 1980:173). On the other hand, intralingual errors are those due to the language being learnt (target language), independent of the native language. As Richards (1971:1) suggests, they are items produced by the learner by the influence of generalizations based on partial exposure to the target language. The learner, in this case, tries to derive the L2 rules behind the data to which he/she has been exposed, and may develop hypotheses that correspond neither to the native language nor to the target language.

As a teacher, it is necessary to find some teaching strategies to overcome such errors in the classroom and keep the students motivated at the same time. There are many media that can be used to improve students’ vocabulary like audio aids, visual aids and the audio-visual aids etc. Examples of audio aid are radio, music, and so on while examples of audio-visual aid are video, film/movie, animation, and television, etc. In this study, content videos are chosen as media for teaching vocabulary and overcoming problems of interlingual and intralingual Transfer.

Kress (2010) suggests that because of the increasing importance of visual and media images, videos have a great potential in the language classroom, as they bring ‘together a large variety of modes’ (p. 30). They would address the 5 senses of the learners and thus attract their attention and keep them involved for a longer period of time (compared to traditional teaching methodologies). They can also be considered as pedagogically valuable sources of language input which can be used inside or outside the classroom as long as they are relevant to the point or have been designed with a specific pedagogical purpose in mind and levelled carefully to the linguistic and cognitive development of young learners.

In relation to vocabulary learning specifically, visual representations encourage learning, as emphasised by Miller (2012:203), who asserts the positive effect on vocabulary learning that is achieved when students are able to represent new words visually in their actual contextual use. That is, in authentic video, where second language speech is delivered naturally with the visual cues that are either in still (verbal) or kinaesthetic form, such as eye contact, facial expression, body language or actions and movement offered by characters that can compensate for the learner’s lack of contextual use of vocabulary in EFL context which lead to intralingual errors. A study conducted by Secules and Tomasello (1992:480) documents the effectiveness of visual cues empirically, where the researchers compared video-based instruction with traditional approaches that mainly focus on exercises and drills for university English speakers learning French. Their findings show that the video-based instruction group outperformed the traditional approach group across comprehension tasks.

Content videos with their combination of visual and audio channels can also form a major source of lexical input with high level for retention to compensate for the need to fill gaps in the learners’ L2 with their L1. According to the dual-coding theory of Paivio (1971), “verbal information, such as the audio track, and written text in the case of subtitles, as well as non-verbal information, such as images and actions within the video, are sorted separately in the receiver brain, but are linked by referential connection, which connects the two systems in a complex associative network” (149- 210). Therefore, when learning a word that has more than one mode, the word will be coded dually, which may facilitate a successful retention of the word. In this sense, there should be a high semantic match between the audio and visual channels in the video materials in order for the potential effectiveness of audio-visual materials to increases learners’ comprehension and vocabulary recall.