Oldal 80 [80]
EXTRAMURAL ENGLISH ACTIVITIES AND INDIVIDUAL LEARNER DIFFERENCES
4.5.4 Watching videos in English
The next theme was watching videos in English on different video-sharing
websites. YouTube is among the most visited online platforms, so it was no
surprise that participants said they watched videos mostly on YouTube. In the
initial interviews, female and male learners reported different interests in terms
of which categories they liked to watch. Most female participants like watch¬
ing beauty channels on YouTube and interviews with movie stars. Talk shows
are also a popular choice among girls. Beatrice, for example, said that “well, I
like watching Hollywood talk shows mostly, but not that often.”
Besides, Valentina states that she watches tutorial videos on personal com¬
puter troubleshooting, for instance, and educational videos providing informa¬
tion on a particular topic. She explains that the information is more accessible
on the Internet in English than in Hungarian. In her words:
[I watch] educational videos, [...] because the internet can convey lots of information
which is better explained in English than in Hungarian, and yes, I regularly [watch
them] in English, I’m especially interested in diseases and also there are many
biographies that make more sense in English than Hungarian.
By consuming content to gain knowledge and explaining that such content
“makes more sense in English,” participants reflect on the functional practice
notion in SLA (Bialystok 1981). Here participants emphasize the use of language
as a means of gaining new knowledge, and in such situations, they may be
regarded as language users, not language learners. This obviously does not
mean that no L2 learning can take place, but the deliberate emphasis is placed
on language use, and L2 learning may occur simultaneously (Bialystok 1981).
In addition, since the dominance of the English language is much higher than
that of the Hungarian language and this is perceived by most Hungarian EFL
learners (Csizér—Lukacs 2010), it makes sense to try to find information in
English rather than Hungarian, especially when it comes to more technical
topics.
Boys, on the one hand, prefer tutorial videos and video blogs about video
games and gaming. Christian, for instance, watches lots of gaming videos and
streams as well. In his words: “[I] usually watch Twitch gaming streams.”
Similarly, Victor also watches streams on Twitch where no subtitles are avail¬
able, which may lead to an increased cognitive burden (Baranowska 2020) when
it comes to understanding the streamers; however, this also definitely contrib¬
utes to improving his listening skills and can at the same time help him un¬
derstand the different native and non-native English accents (Mitterer-McQueen
2009). Valentina, a female participant, identified as a “gamer” in the interview
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