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Distance education project of English idioms learning from watching YouTube

Paper · 2023 · Viphavee Vongpumivitch, Li-Tang Yu and Thuy Phuong Nguyen

Summary

English idioms are hard for Vietnamese learners because official textbooks include very few of them and teachers rarely stress them. This brief report asks whether free YouTube idiom lessons, used as distance-learning material, can fill that gap, and whether exercises after viewing add anything beyond note-taking. The authors took idioms from three popular native-speaker channels and confirmed each against a standard idiom dictionary. A pilot knowledge test then kept only the idioms that no participant already knew. Thirty-four students were randomly split into two groups. Both groups watched ten short videos and took notes, but only the experimental group did extra exercises afterwards. Retention was checked with immediate and delayed post-tests and a survey. The two groups retained the idioms about equally well, and most students earned perfect scores. Learners were also positive about learning through YouTube. The authors conclude that watching plus note-taking already gives enough processing depth for self-study. They caution that the sample was small, the study was short and there was no group without notes.

Key points

  • Materials came from the channels English with Max, English with Lucy and AccurateEnglish. Each idiom was verified against The Oxford Dictionary of Idioms (Siefring, 2005).
  • The pilot test was a vocabulary knowledge scale (VKS) adapted from Wesche and Paribakht (1996). It narrowed 37 candidate idioms to 20 that were unknown to every participant. These were spread over 10 videos with two idioms each.
  • There were 34 students, 17 per group. Both groups took notes, and only the experimental group did exercises after watching. Measures were an immediate post-test, a delayed post-test and an attitude survey.
  • In both groups, more than 60% of students scored a perfect 10 on both tests, and the extra exercises gave no clear advantage. On the survey, all experimental-group students said they would keep using YouTube for idioms. In the control group, 24% said they would not.
  • The authors list these limitations: small sample, short duration, low-proficiency learners and few idioms tested. They also note there was no baseline group that watched without notes or exercises.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The authors used a pre-screening test to keep only items no participant knew, so the post-tests measured new learning rather than prior knowledge.
  • I2. Candidate idioms were checked against an authoritative idiom dictionary before being treated as genuine non-compositional expressions.
  • I3. Retention was tested twice, immediately and after a delay, to tell short-lived gains from lasting ones.
  • I4. The authors note that, without a group that only watched, the benefit of note-taking cannot be separated from simple exposure.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): Before evaluating idiom or rare-construction handling, filter the test set against everything already in the lexicon and training data. Gains then reflect generalisation, not memorised entries.
  • I2 (world): Build an idiom list validated against a dictionary and attach it to compiled knowledge. This lets the system mark such spans as fixed meanings instead of composing them word by word.
  • I3 (learn): Re-run earlier evaluation suites after later training or repair-rule rounds to catch skills that quietly degrade over time.
  • I4 (learn): Every proposed component, such as a new rule tier or teacher pass, should be compared against a bare baseline with that component removed, as a negative control.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓National Tsing Hua UniversityHsinchu · Taiwan8 works · 834 citations

Also on the byline: FPT University.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 6The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksInformation Systems · 1,437 worksPsychology · 1,552 worksDevelopmental and Educational Psychology · 499 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 worksIdioms & multiword expressions · 217 works

Cite

Cite as Viphavee Vongpumivitch, Li-Tang Yu and Thuy Phuong Nguyen. 2023. Distance education project of English idioms learning from watching YouTube. Frontiers in Psychology 14.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1171735

@inproceedings{vongpumivitch2023distance,
  title = {{Distance education project of English idioms learning from watching YouTube}},
  author = {Viphavee Vongpumivitch, Li-Tang Yu and Thuy Phuong Nguyen},
  booktitle = {Frontiers in Psychology 14},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1171735},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1171735}
}

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