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Vol. 6, No. 3, December 2023, pp. 151-161  

       https://doi.org/10.12928/eltej.v6i3.10068          http://journal2.uad.ac.id/index.php/eltej/index        eltej@pbi.uad.ac.id  

Binge-watching TV series: English subtitles as an alternative to 

graded readers for extensive reading 

Wenhua Hsu 

I-Shou University, No. 1, Sec. 1, Syuecheng Rd, Dashu District, Kaohsiung City 84001, Taiwan  

 whh@isu.edu.tw  

 

A R T I C L E  I N F O 

  

A B ST R ACT   

 

 

Article history 

Received 16 August 2023 

Revised 12 October 2023 

Accepted 15 December 2023 

  ‘Drama fever’ has been riding high with increasing consumer usage of 
OTT streaming services and prevalence of Internet-connected mobile 
devices, leading to the phenomenon of binge-watching on college 
campuses in Taiwan. In lieu of graded readers, which top out at the 
first 3000—4000 word-family levels, this study targeted English 
subtitles as an alternative source of input, since they also offer EFL 
leaners a channel for exposure to English. To examine this alternative, 
this study first measured the vocabulary levels of English subtitles for 
the potential thereof as extensive reading material. The researcher 
compiled four corpora with each having approximately 2.5 million 
English-subtitled words from Korean, Japanese, American and 
Chinese TV series across a couple of genres with high viewership 
ratings on OTT services for comparison. The operational measures 
involved the ranked twenty-five 1000-word-family lists along the 
word-frequency scale of the British National Corpus and the Corpus 
of Contemporary American English. Results showed that English-
subtitled Korean, Japanese and Chinese dramas reached the 2nd—3rd 
1000 word-family levels at 95% text coverage and the 4th—5th 1000 
levels at 98% coverage, while American series extended to the 7th—
8th 1000 levels at 98% coverage from the 3rd—4th 1000 levels at 95% 
coverage. Moreover, ten participants expressed their views on 
watching English-subtitled dramas to a certain level of agreement. The 
data may serve as a reference concerning the vocabulary goal within 
the first 5000 word families for EFL learners if they continually binge-
watch drama series in their leisure time.  

 

This is an open access article under the CC–BY-SA license.    

 

 
Keywords 

English subtitles 

Extensive reading 

Vocabulary level 

 

 

  

How to Cite: Hsu, W. (2023). Binge-watching TV series: English subtitles as an alternative to graded readers 
for extensive reading. English Language Teaching Educational Journal, 6 (3), 151-161. 
https://doi.org/10.12928/eltej.v6i3.10068 

1. Introduction  

In recent years, how people watch television (TV) series has changed a lot. With the rapid rise of 
over-the-top (OTT) streaming services (such as Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video), the 
shift has been significant from traditional appointment viewing to viewing on streaming services, 
especially for young people. Appointment viewing means sitting on the couch in front of a television 
set to watch satellite or cable TV programs in a once-daily or once-weekly broadcasting format, while 
streaming platforms via Internet-connected mobile devices can be accessed anywhere anytime, which 
allows for binge-watching with much ease. According to Cambridge Dictionary, the meaning of 
binge-watch is to watch several episodes of a TV series or program one after another. In a survey 
carried out by Netflix (2014) on viewing habits, approximately 1500 TV streamers described their 
binge-watching behavior as viewing from two to six episodes in one sitting. 

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152 English Language Teaching Educational Journal   ISSN 2621-6485 

 Vol. 6, No. 3, December 2023, pp. 151-161 

 Wenhua Hsu (Binge-watching TV series: English subtitles as an alternative…..) 

This research motive stems from the binge-watching phenomenon on college campuses in Taiwan, 
where English is a foreign language (EFL) and a required subject. During the class break, the 
researcher at times overhears her students chatting about which drama is streaming and popular. 
Binge-watching dramas seems to have become one of their leisure activities in free time. On OTT 
platforms such as Netflix, where drama series are broadcast to global audiences, English is often the 
first language into which foreign dramas are translated, and then as a pivot translation, English 
subtitles serve as the source texts for translation into many other languages (Locher & Messerli, 2020; 
Pedersen, 2019). However, a regularly repeated, informal classroom survey over the past year told the 
researcher that an overwhelming majority of our students primarily chose Mandarin (the first 
language) subtitles to watch. The few chose English subtitles are English majors. Right after the 
question concerning which language subtitles are used is the quick inquiry about which language 
drama they prefer to watch. Nearly three-fifths of the students being asked to answer admitted that 
they are Korean drama buffs, while one-fifth of them expressed their preference for Japanese dramas 
and less than one-fifth for Chinese dramas. Only a handful of students stated that they like to watch 
American movies rather than American TV series on OTT platforms, but they use Mandarin subtitles. 
As such, the researcher has been concerned with English lexical growth if the viewing habit shifts 
from Mandarin to English subtitles. 

Subtitles are on-screen texts in the viewer’s first language (L1) as opposed to L2 captions in L2 
videos (Markham & Peter, 2003). Different from the two standard situations (L1 subtitles and L2 
captions in L2 videos), the current context refers to subtitles in the viewer’s L2 (English) in L3 
(Korean, Japanese) videos, which may compel Taiwanese students with little knowledge of L3 to rely 
upon on-screen texts in English if they do not use Mandarin subtitles. In this situation, English subtitles 
in L3 dramas may be compared to graded readers that English teachers like ours often encourage their 
EFL students to read in an extensive reading scheme.  

Vocabulary learning is a gradual process. Extensive reading, informed by Krashen’s (1985) input 
hypothesis, has long been promoted for vocabulary learning (Day & Bamford, 1998, 2004; Horst, 
2005). Learners are encouraged to choose reading materials of their interest that are lower than or 
equivalent to their proficiency level without feeling daunted (Waring & McLean, 2015). As the word 
‘extensive’ has suggested, learners need to engage in voluminous reading in order to have sufficient 
encounter with unfamiliar words for acquisition to occur. They need to read in quantities large enough 
to eventually internalize how those unfamiliar words are used and how they collocate with the words 
surrounding them (Nation, 2015).  

To carry out an extensive reading scheme, English teachers often adopt reputable publishers’ 
vocabulary-controlled graded reader series (e.g. Cambridge Readers, Oxford Bookworms, Macmillan 
Guided Readers, Penguin Readers) for their students to choose from. Having six to seven levels and 
ranging from 250 to 3800 headwords, graded readers top out at the first 3000–4000 word-family levels 
(Claridge, 2012; McQuillan, 2016). As the vocabulary levels have shown, graded readers can be an 
important source of input for intermediate-level EFL learners. However, due to a limited budget for 
purchase, the number of such readers that EFL learners are asked to read may be actually still small. 
There is also the question of interest—not every EFL learner thinks of graded readers to be engaging 
enough to do voluminous reading, which entails reading several million words.  

To enhance English vocabulary growth, Webb and Rodgers (2009) advocated that watching 
English TV programs may be intriguing to L2 learners. They collected eighty-eight English scripts of 
various American and British TV series and gauged the vocabulary levels thereof along the word-
frequency scale of the British National Corpus, which ranks words from the 1st to 14th 1000-word-
family levels. Using 95% and 98% lexical coverage of text (knowledge of 95 and 98 words per 100 
words) as the lower and upper thresholds, they measured the vocabulary demands of TV programs. 
Results showed that knowledge of the first 2000 to 4000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal 
words would account for 95% coverage of TV program transcripts, whereas knowledge of the first 
5000 to 9000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words would provide 98% coverage 
subject to drama genres. 

In subsequent research on how to effectively use TV programs for English learning, Rodgers and 
Webb (2011) recommended narrow viewing by watching programs with related themes rather than 
random episodes from programs with different themes or by watching a series of seasons of programs 
with similar storylines. They offered some evidence that the number of words occurring once was 



ISSN 2621-6485 English Language Teaching Educational Journal 153 
Vol. 6, No. 3, December 2023, pp. 151-161 

 Wenhua Hsu (Binge-watching TV series: English subtitles as an alternative…..) 

larger and the number of low-frequency words occurring ten times or more was smaller in unrelated 
TV programs than in related programs. This implies that TV series with a story arc linking episodes 
thereof are likely to use fewer variety of words and thus have a lower vocabulary load than unrelated 
programs, yet for learners, the chance of having a greater number of encounters with those words is 
higher, increasing the likelihood of vocabulary learning.  

Using American TV shows streaming on Netflix, Dizon (2016) compared intermediate-level 
Japanese EFL learners’ perceptions towards the use of L1 subtitles, L2 subtitles, and no subtitles. 
Among the three subtitling modes, L2 subtitles were favored over L1 subtitles or no subtitles, 
suggesting that the learners neither would like to depend on their mother tongue nor had the English 
proficiency enough to watch the video without subtitles. In a subsequent study, Dizon (2018) provided 
nine Japanese EFL students with free access to Netflix for three months in a bid to find out how these 
students use the on-demand video resources in their spare time. Most comments collected from these 
students mentioned the benefits of L2 subtitles for comprehension and vocabulary learning. 

Through a scoping review and meta-analysis, Reynolds, Cui, Kao and Thomas (2022) scrutinized 
139 past studies in an attempt to understand how the viewing of captioned and subtitled videos can 
lead to effective vocabulary learning. They concluded that viewing captioned or subtitled videos in 
any type had a positive effect on vocabulary learning. Reynolds et al’s (2022) scoping review has 
some implications for this research in terms of vocabulary learning in L3 video or L1 video with L2 
(target language) subtitles. 

As mentioned above, avid drama fans like our students can marathon a TV series in one sitting 
during holidays or engage in “serial viewing” (Rubenking & Bracken, 2021, p. 100356) over the 
course of several days or weeks in their spare time. If Taiwanese college students use English (L2) 
subtitles in lieu of Mandarin (L1) subtitles, the researcher is inclined to believe that the impetus may 
make possible sustained reading of English subtitles while binge-watching TV series on OTT. As with 
graded readers, English subtitles in this scenario turn to be lexical learning resources of value. If we 
draw parallels between extensive reading of graded readers and voluminous reading of English 
subtitles, they both share some common purposes such as reading for pleasure, building reading 
fluency as well as sustaining vocabulary growth (Day & Bamford, 2004). 

This research addressed two questions concerning English subtitles as an alternative to graded 
readers for extensive reading. 

1. What are the vocabulary levels of English-subtitled Korean, Japanese and Chinese dramas as 
opposed to American dramas? 

2. What are the learners’ perceptions regarding viewing English-subtitled dramas? 

2. Methodology  

2.1. The Corpora 

The present corpora consisted of four sub-corpora (Korean, Japanese, American and Chinese 
dramas), each containing approximately 2.5 million words from different TV series across a couple 
of genres (e.g., romance, coming of age, action, crimes, fantasy, thriller, legal and medical dramas) 
with high viewership ratings on OTT services, totaling 10,009,068 running words (see Table 1). 
Inclusion of popular dramas in each sub-corpus was based upon the assumption that the TV series of 
high viewership on OTT platforms are likely to have been watched by a large number of drama fans 
around the world. It is worth highlighting that most TV series are a fusion of several genres rather 
than limited to a single genre. For example, a medical series may be intertwined with genres such as 
crimes, romance or even comedy, leading to many twists and turns, say, homicidal scenarios and legal 
interrogations. In terms of corpus size (over 10 million words), genre balance and high viewership, 
the present corpus should suffice to provide a reliable measurement of vocabulary levels thereof. 

TV series English subtitles in SubRip Text (SRT) files were downloaded from the Internet for 
research purposes. They are the plain text files, including the subtitles in sequence along with the start 
and end timecodes. There are one or two lines of subtitles per scene with 7 to 8 words at most per line. 
Below is the excerpt in SRT format from Episode 1 of Crash Landing on You, a blockbuster series on 
Netflix Asian in 2019—2020, for a snapshot of SRT files. 



154 English Language Teaching Educational Journal   ISSN 2621-6485 

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 Wenhua Hsu (Binge-watching TV series: English subtitles as an alternative…..) 

70 
00:05:50,200 --> 00:05:52,240 
-Damn it. 
-Did she hang up on you again? 
71 
00:05:52,330 --> 00:05:54,660 
-This little brat. 
-Just leave her be. 
72 
00:05:54,750 --> 00:05:57,580 
It's been years since Se-ri estranged 
the whole family. Don't bother. 
73 
00:05:57,670 --> 00:05:59,960 
I only called her 
because Dad wanted me to. 
74 
00:06:00,880 --> 00:06:03,630 
By the way, why did Father 
summon all of us today? 
75 
00:06:04,380 --> 00:06:05,720 
That must be it, right? 
76 
00:06:06,800 --> 00:06:09,800 
-Announcing the heir. 
-Announcing the heir. 

Table 1.  The English Subtitle Corpus 

  TV series with high viewership ratings Number of 

series 

Total 

words 
Korean 

(L3) 

dramas 

Squid Game, The Glory (2 seasons), the World of the Married, Reborn Rich, 

Sky Castle, Crash Landing on You, Reply 1988, Goblin, Doctor Cha, 

Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Mr. Queen, Crash Course in Romance, Hospital 

Playlist (2 seasons), Moving, My Dearest (2 seasons), Alchemy of Souls (2 

seasons), Dr. Romantic (3 Seasons), Taxi Driver (2 seasons) 

25  

(Each 

series 

ranges 

from 16 to 

24 

episodes.) 

2,502,254 

Japanese 

(L3) 

dramas 

One Litre no Namida, One Piece, Imawa no Kuni no Alice (2 seasons), First 

love: Hatsukoi, Mystery to Iunakare, Unnatural, 3 Nen A Gumi: Ima kara 

Mina-san wa, Hitojichi Desu, Hanzawa Naoki, Mother, Kazoku Game, Tenno 

no Ryoriban, MIU 404, Silent, Brush up Life, Boku no Ita Jikan, Tonbi, 

Soredemo, Ikite Yuku, Hanzawa Naoki, Ouroboros, Code Blue (3 seasons), 

Juhan Shuttai, Kyo Kara Ore wa, Liar Game, Koi wa Tsuzuku yo Doko Made 

mo, The Confidence Man JP, Boku Dake ga Inai Machi, Kono Sekai no 

Katasumi ni, Dele, Konto ga Hajimaru, Nanba MG5, 99.9: Keiji Senmon 

Bengoshi, Jin, N no Tame ni, Good Doctor, Doctor X, Nijiiro Karute, Bitter 

Blood, Bokura wa Kiseki de Dekite Iru, Cold Case: Shinjitsu no Tobira, Koi 

Desu: Yankee-kun to Hakujou Garu, Kounodori, Tengoku to Jigoku: 

Psychona Futari, Kieta Hatsukoi, Influence, Ore no Sukato, Doko Itta.  

50  

(Each 

series 

ranges 

from 8 to 

12 

episodes.)  

2,490,044 

American 

(L2) 

dramas 

Young Sheldon (6 seasons), My Life with the Walter Boys, Sweet Home (2 

seasons), the Crown (6 seasons), Bodies, Neon, Love is Blind (5 seasons), 

The Fall of the House of Usher, Lupin (3 seasons), Outlanders (7 seasons), 

Sex Education (4 seasons), Shameless (11 seasons), Painkiller, Alice in 

Borderland (2 seasons), Kleo, The Witcher (3 seasons), Insecure (5 seasons), 

Wednesday, Black Mirror (6 seasons), Suits ( 9 seasons), Never Have I ever 

(4 seasons). 

80 

(Each 

series 

ranges 

from 4 to 

22 

episodes.) 

2,507,792 

Chinese 

(L1) 

dramas 

The Untamed, Nirvana in Fire, Hidden Love, Love like the Galaxy (2 

seasons), Mysterious Lotus Casebook, Joy of Life, When I fly towards you, 

Go Ahead, The Blood of Youth, Meet Yourself, Love between Fairy and 

Devil, Eternal Love, The Story of Ming Lang, Story of Yanxi Palace.  

15 

(Each 

series 

ranges 

from 24 to 

78 

episodes.) 

2,508,978 



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 Wenhua Hsu (Binge-watching TV series: English subtitles as an alternative…..) 

 

2.2 Instrument and Data Processing 

Lexical text coverage refers to ‘‘the percentage of running words in the text known by the reader’’ 
(Nation, 2006, p. 61). Some researchers regard five unknown words in every 100 words (95% text 
coverage) as the boundary beneath which readers may not be able to get adequate comprehension of 
an authentic text (Laufer, 1989; Read, 2000). Nation (2006) noted that 98% text coverage, i.e. two 
unknown words per 100 words, is ideal for guessing words from context and may offer good 
conditions for lexical learning. These two putative coverage points have been proposed for setting 
vocabulary thresholds for different purposes: 95% text coverage for reasonable comprehension 
(Laufer & Ravenhorst-Kalovski, 2010) and 98% coverage for pleasure reading (Hirsh & Nation, 1992) 
as well as for unassisted reading (Hu & Nation, 2000).  

As far as video viewing is concerned, a lower vocabulary threshold such as 95% lexical coverage 
may be a likely condition for guessing words from context successfully, since video affords viewers 
extra-linguistic support (e.g., body language) to gain understanding (van Zeeland & Schmitt, 2013). 
Visual clues may make it less difficult for EFL learners to guess meanings from context, even if their 
lexical knowledge falls short of 95% text coverage. In her recent research, Laufer (2020) detected that 
95% text coverage could be reached with an initial knowledge of 90% words in the text plus inferring 
an additional 5% words. Webb and Rodgers (2009) even surmised that the necessary text coverage 
for adequate comprehension of television programs is likely to be as low as 90%.  

A vocabulary threshold or level hinges on the predetermined text coverage point. For instance, 
98% lexical coverage of Voice of America (VOA) news entails mastery of the first 6000 word families 
while 95% text coverage requires knowledge of the first 3000—4000 word families (Hsu, 2019). In 
line with past studies, this research adopted both 95% and 98% coverage as a cutoff for measuring the 
vocabulary levels of English subtitles. Through the word-frequency scale of the British National 
Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (BNC/COCA) ranking twenty-five 1000 
words families by frequency and dispersion (Nation, 2016, 2017), the researcher counted how many 
of the ranked 1000-word-family lists from the first 1000 were needed until the total text coverage 
accumulated to 95% or 98%. Meanwhile, the vocabulary level was extrapolated according to which 
1000-word-family list was the last one being added when the cumulative coverage reached 95% or 
98%. 

The AntWordProfiler Version 2.1.0 (Anthony, 2023) was implemented to analyze the lexical 
profiling of English subtitles. In addition to the ranked 25 BNC/COCA 1000-word-family lists, 
another four ever-growing lists of marginal words, proper nouns, abbreviations and transparent 
compounds complied by Nation (2017) were also installed to the program. The words that were placed 
at the ‘Words NOT Found In Base Lists’ (hereafter called off-list) by the AntWordProfiler were 
further examined. 

If off-list words were marginal words (ouch, huh, geez) and personal or geographical names, they 
were supplemented to the existing interjection list and proper noun list in turn. For hyphenated 
transparent compounds in the off-list, TextMate 2.0 was applied to replace these words with a space. 
The hyphens were summarily removed so that these compounds would not be mistaken by the 
AntWordProfiler for off-list words. Similarly, closed compounds in the off-list were added to the 
existing compound list to avoid double counting if their component words are already in the 
BNC/COCA word lists. 

Proper nouns, spoken interjections, transparent compounds and abbreviations do not make reading 
arduous. Excluding their text coverage would inflate the vocabulary level and overestimate the 
vocabulary threshold required for adequate comprehension (Nation, 2006; Nurmukhamedov & Webb, 
2019), since the reading load they put on is manageable. 

It may not be difficult to recognize a proper noun due to transliteration or the capitalization of its 
first letter. Spoken interjections can be ignored because of little influence on reading comprehension. 
One can infer the meaning of a transparent compound from its constituent words effortlessly if the 
learner is already familiar with its individual words. Being infrequent, abbreviations do not pose a 
hurdle in subtitle reading. The meaning of an abbreviation may be talked about in subsequent 
dialogues, or it may be a familiar one in daily life. Following previous research taking the text 
coverage of these four types of words into account (Nation, 2006; Rodgers & Webb, 2011; Webb & 



156 English Language Teaching Educational Journal   ISSN 2621-6485 

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Rodgers, 2009), the researcher also counted them in to avoid overestimation until 95% and 98% 
coverage points were achieved. 

2.3 Word Family as a Counting Unit for lexical coverage 

This research involves reading English subtitles while viewing streaming TV series in different 
languages. For reading purposes, English word recognition is essential for comprehension. Word 
lemmas as a counting unit may be less preferable to word families in terms of an overestimate of the 
recognition vocabulary amount needed for good comprehension according to Webb (2021). A word 
lemma contains a base form and inflectional forms that belong to the same part of speech, while a 
word family additionally includes derivational affixes (Nation & Meara, 2010). For instance, fuel and 
fuels as nouns as well as fuel, fuels, fueled and fueling in verb forms would be different lemmas. They 
would be categorized into two lemmas or counted as one word family, leading to different vocabulary 
sizes. To avoid overestimation, ‘word family’ was used as a counting unit for lexical coverage. 

2.4 The New Vocabulary Levels Test and Interview 

Ten college freshmen in the researcher’s class volunteered to watch English subtitled dramas of 
their choice in their spare time for one semester. They were given free access to Netflix for one year 
as a reward but they were asked to watch Korean, Japanese, Chinese, American dramas at least one 
series for each language within 4 months. Before viewing, the Vocabulary Levels Test (Webb, Sasao 
& Balance, 2017) was used to measure their vocabulary size. After four month’s viewing, they were 
interviewed regarding their perception of viewing English-subtitled TV series, especially their views 
on non-English-speaking dramas. 

3. Findings and Discussion 

3.1 Vocabulary Levels of English-subtitled Korean, Japanese, Chinese Dramas as opposed to 

American Dramas 

Table 2 provides a snapshot of the vocabulary levels of English subtitles across TV series in four 
different languages at 95% and 98% text coverage and the coverage distribution among the 
BNC/COCA 1st to 25th 1000-word-family levels. 

Table 2.  Vocabulary Levels of English Subtitles Along the BNC/COCA Word-frequency Scale 

 English subtitles of 

Korean (L3) dramas 

English subtitles of 

Japanese (L3) dramas 

English captions of 

American (L2) dramas 

English subtitles of 

Chinese (L1) dramas 

Word list Text 

coverage 

Cumulative 

coverage 

Text 

coverage 

Cumulative 

coverage 

Text 

coverage 

Cumulative 

coverage 

Text 

coverage 

Cumulative 

coverage 

Proper 

nouns etc. 

3.27% 3.27% 3.20% 3.20% 3.08% 3.08% 3.33% 3.33% 

1st 1000 87.37% 90.64% 87.74% 90.94% 84.03% 87.11% 87.43% 90.76% 

2nd 1000 4.32% 94.96% 4.06% *95.00% 5.01% 92.12% 4.12% 94.88% 

3rd 1000 1.98% *96.94% 1.79% 96.79% 1.98% 94.10% 1.84% *96.72% 

4th 1000 0.96% 97.90% 1.22% **98.01% 1.65% *95.75% 0.92% 97.64% 

5th 1000 0.83% **98.73% 0.77% 98.78% 0.95% 96.70% 0.78% **98.42% 

6th 1000 0.31% 99.04% 0.38% 99.16% 0.76% 97.46% 0.53% 98.95% 

7th 1000 0.21% 99.25% 0.08% 99.24% 0.52% 97.98% 0.44% 99.39% 

8th 1000 0.09% 99.34% 0.07% 99.31% 0.44% **98.42% 0.27% 99.66% 

9th 1000 0.07% 99.41% 0.07% 99.38% 0.42% 98.84% 0.12% 99.78% 

10th—25th 

1000 

0.59% 100% 0.62% 100% 1.16% 100% 0.22% 100% 

Total words 2,502,254  2,490,044  2,507,792  2,508,978  

 

As shown in Table 2, the first 1000 word families accounted for 84.03%—87.74% of the total 
words in the sub-corpora and the second 1000 made up 4.06%—5.01%%. The combined text coverage 
of the first 2000 word families (89.04%—91.8%) was higher than the average 86%–90% covered by 



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the first BNC 2000 word families in texts of different genres (Nation, 2006). This result offers a beacon 
of hope for EFL students with a base vocabulary only (at the 2000—3000 word-family levels).  

A further look at Table 2 shows that after the first 2000 words, the subtitle coverage of the third 
1000 reduced to below 2% and further dropped to less than 1% at the fifth 1000. English subtitles in 
non-English-speaking TV series used a small vocabulary, converging at the first 2000—3000 word-
family levels. Knowledge of the first 2000—3000 word families plus interjections, proper nouns, 
transparent compounds and abbreviations would be enough to provide 95% coverage of English 
subtitles for reasonable or minimally acceptable comprehension (see Table 2 for cumulative coverage 
96.94%, 95%, 96.72% at the 2nd and 3rd 1000 levels for Korean, Japanese and Chinese dramas 
respectively). Learners with knowledge of the first 4000—5000 word families (providing 98.73%, 
98.01%, 98.42% coverage for Korean, Japanese and Chinese dramas) should be able to read English 
subtitles with less difficulty. In other words, watching English-subtitled non-English-speaking TV 
series like Korean, Japanese and Chinese dramas did not demand a higher vocabulary capacity than 
the others.  

In contrast with non-English-speaking dramas, watching American TV series was the most 
vocabulary-demanding (3000—4000 word families at 95% coverage and stretching to 7000—8000 
word families at 98% coverage). English subtitles at a higher vocabulary level can be interpreted as 
having more English words appearing in the latter 1000-word-family bands along the BNC/COCA 
word-frequency scale. Reaching the 8000 word-family level means that American series entail a much 
larger vocabulary than the other three non-English-speaking dramas and watching American series 
would result in EFL learners working on a wider variety of vocabulary subject to genres. However, 
the slightly below 95% coverage in American series that knowledge of the first 2000—3000 word 
families plus marginal words and proper nouns would provide may still fall within the parameters 
where good comprehension takes place (Nation, 2006).  

Regardless of non-English-speaking or English-speaking dramas, if EFL learners have a 
vocabulary capacity of the first 8000 word families, they would be able to view English-subtitled TV 
series rather smoothly without constantly guessing unknown words or frequent dictionary lookups. 
Compared with a vocabulary size of the first 3000—4000 to 7000—8000 word families needed to 
watch American series, watching non-English-speaking dramas with English subtitles is a lot easier, 
since knowledge of the first 2000—3000 to 4000—5000 word families would suffice to provide 95% 
to 98% text coverage. However, this signals that watching non-English-speaking dramas may not 
bring about greater vocabulary development as watching American series.  

In answer to RQ1 ‘What are the vocabulary levels of English-subtitled Korean, Japanese and 
Chinese dramas as opposed to American dramas?’, Table 2 shows that they generally reached the 2nd–
3rd 1000-word-family levels at 95% text coverage and spread to the 4th–5th 1000 at 98% coverage as 
opposed to American dramas spanning from the 3rd–4th 1000 word-family level at 95% coverage to 
the 7th–8th 1000 level at 98% coverage. By and large, EFL drama buffs with knowledge of the first 
2000 to 3000 word families can be encouraged to give viewing English-subtitled dramas a try, since 
they are supported with rich visual imagery, which further lowers the vocabulary demand. Therefore, 
watching English-subtitled dramas may not be a formidable task as we have expected. EFL learners 
planning to watch captioned American dramas may need to know a minimum of the first 3000—4000 
word families in order to enjoy binge-watching American series.  

As aforementioned, the lowest levels of graded readers contain only a few hundred headwords, 
most go up to around 3000 headwords, and the very highest levels go up to 4000—5000 headwords, 
equivalent to the first 3000—4000 word-family levels at 98% text coverage. Compared with graded 
readers, the vocabulary levels of English subtitles in TV series are above the most advanced graded 
reader level. Moreover, TV dramas often involve some societal issues to which global audience can 
relate to, such as bullying, corruption, gender inequality, sexual harassment as well as daily life topics 
like family, friendship and marriage. The diversity of subject matter in TV dramas implies that English 
subtitles thereof may be a rich language learning resource. 

3.2 Learners’ perception towards viewing English-subtitled dramas 

Based on the Vocabulary Levels Test (Webb, Sasao & Balance, 2017) scores, the recognition 
vocabulary of the ten participants ranged from the first 2000 to 6000 word-family level. Seven of them 
converged at the 3000—4000 word-family levels with one student reaching the 6000 word-family 



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 Wenhua Hsu (Binge-watching TV series: English subtitles as an alternative…..) 

level and two with a base vocabulary at the 2000—3000 word-family level. At the end of the semester, 
all of the ten participants had completed the English-subtitled drama viewing assignment—at least 
one Korean, Japanese, Chinese and American series of their choice respectively. 

Subsequently, they were interviewed to express their views on watching English-subtitled Korean 
and Japanese (L3), American English (L2) and Chinese (L1) TV series. The ten participants showed 
a level of agreement in their responses regarding the difficulty of English subtitles. They all 
commented that viewing English-subtitled Korean, Japanese and Chinese dramas was not so 
formidable as they had expected, but they felt a little more difficult while watching American series. 
This may be because the vocabulary sizes of the participants have all attained a minimum threshold 
at the first 2000 to 3000 word-family levels for Korean, Japanese, Chinese dramas but the vocabulary 
capacities of two participants fell below the minimal demand of the first 3000 to 4000 word-family 
levels for American series. Their responses concurred with some lexical researchers’ proposition that 
95% text coverage (percentage of known words in a text) is ideal for reasonable comprehension. Or 
it was likely that through visual representations and cumulative background knowledge over episodes 
and series, learners with knowledge of words covering slightly lower than 95% of subtitled text may 
still provide general comprehension of the scenarios and plots.  

Not very surprisingly, most of them admitted that they did not pay much attention to English 
subtitles when they watched Chinese dramas, since they could hear Mandarin (L1) dialogues 
effortlessly. For this issue, one of them jokingly suggested turning off the audio or turning down the 
volume. As to Korean and Japanese dramas, they remarked that they had no choice but to rely on 
English subtitles since they knew little about Korean or Japanese. One participant even used the idiom 
‘kill two birds with one stone’ to tell the researcher that he can learn English together with spoken 

Korean. Then he blurted out 매우 감사합니다, meaning ‘thank you very much’.  

When asked about their preference for English-speaking dramas or non-English-speaking dramas, 
most of them answered that a gripping plot instead of the language spoken is the key to keeping them 
hooked and binge-watching a TV series. Although only one student showed her preference for 
American dramas and her English was the best among the ten participants, she still felt that watching 
American series was more arduous than Korean, Japanese or Chinese dramas to understand the 
characters’ dialogues per scene. To overcome the hindrance from unknown words, this student said 
that she used a guessing strategy by picking up key words from a sequence of utterances and subtitles 
for general comprehension. In this regard, the two low-proficiency students (having a base vocabulary 
only) mentioned that they could guess meanings without difficulty when they watched Korean or 
Japanese dramas. They gave their reason that the mode of thought and culture in Korean dramas or 
Japanese dramas are close to those in Chinese dramas.    

Some other participants also seconded the two students’ viewpoints about easier guess due to 
similar culture. Very surprisingly, one of them pointed out the word ‘waste’ as an example. This 
participant described a scene she saw in a Korean drama, where a man gives a piggyback to his drunk 
female friend, who just broke up with her boyfriend, and climbs stairs to the rooftop hut of an old mid-
rise apartment without elevators, saying “Shush! You are wasted. Do you want to wake everyone to 
know you were dumped?” This participant said that she already knew the usual meaning of ‘waste’, 
signifying use or expend carelessly, but ‘You are wasted’ impressed her and thus learned a new 
meaning of ‘waste’ from this English subtitle. She further explained that neither ‘You are useless’ nor 
‘You are a jerk’ was what she inferred from the scene. Instead, she guessed the meaning ‘You are 
drunk’ correctly, because such a dramatic scene occurs occasionally in Chinese dramas.   

Overall, the interview reveals that regardless of English-speaking dramas or non-English-speaking 
dramas, learners would still likely gain from English subtitles. They would likely uptake the words 
that are related to their life experiences and relatable scenes may motivate them to use some strategies 
to learn new words or develop further knowledge of familiar words.  

4. Conclusion and Implications 

This research was inspired by the binge-watching phenomenon among Taiwanese college students. 
Because our students enjoy watching dramas on OTT in their leisure time and spend so much time 
binge-watching, this hints that drama fever may make it possible for EFL learners like ours to 
continually engage in watching dramas with English subtitles in lieu of their L1 subtitles. The goal of 



ISSN 2621-6485 English Language Teaching Educational Journal 159 
Vol. 6, No. 3, December 2023, pp. 151-161 

 Wenhua Hsu (Binge-watching TV series: English subtitles as an alternative…..) 

this preliminary study has been to show the potential of English subtitles as an alternative to graded 
readers for extensive reading. 

English-subtitled Korean, Japanese and Chinese dramas reached the 2nd—3rd 1000 word-family 
levels at 95% text coverage and the 4th—5th 1000 levels at 98% coverage subject to genres, while 
American series extended to the 7th—8th 1000 level at 98% coverage from the 3rd—4th 1000 word-
family levels at 95% coverage. Learners with a base vocabulary may find English subtitles a challenge 
at the beginning. However, the interview results tell another story. For the ten participants, incomplete 
comprehension was expected when watching the first few episodes, but they did not feel overwhelmed 
by the amount of unknown words. Visual imagery assisted them in creating the form-meaning link of 
unknown words and therefore made up for insufficient lexical knowledge. 

To overcome fear of watching English-subtitled series at the onset, learners can be advised to 
proceed to watch further on. Comprehension will improve with more and more episodes being 
watched, because the context of an unfamiliar word and its later recurrence may give viewers some 
clues about its meaning. There are still some other ways of helping EFL learners to reduce vocabulary 
load. Gaining background knowledge through trailers and preview facilitates comprehension. With 
the subtitle option on OTT, EFL learners can select the L1 subtitles in the first time viewing and watch 
the same drama later but in English subtitles. Therefore, learners may find it less difficult in the second 
time viewing. Another way to increase the potential for vocabulary learning is to watch the same 
English-subtitled drama multiple times (at spaced intervals) if they enjoy this drama. This would 
increase the number of encounters with unfamiliar words to the point where they may be learned.  

As far as the vocabulary levels involved in English-subtitled Korean, Japanese and Chinese dramas 
are concerned, this research has manifested that EFL learners can get sufficient input from English 
subtitles through binge-watching, just as they do extensive reading of graded readers. The results may 
serve as a reference for English teachers and learners who are concerned with vocabulary learning out 
of class.  

Acknowledgment 

The author wishes to express her profound gratitude to Emeritus Professor Paul Nation for the 
BNC/COCA word lists, which were indispensable to this research.  

Declarations 

Author contribution : Wenhua Hsu is the sole author and responsible for all of this 
manuscript. 

Funding statement : This research was self-supported and did not rely on any institutional 
funding. 

Conflict of interest : The author declares no conflict of interest. 

Ethics declaration : The author acknowledges that this work has been written based on 
ethical research that conforms with the regulations of the author’s 
university and that she has obtained the participants’ permission when 
collecting data. The author supports English Language Teaching 
Educational Journal (ELTEJ) in maintaining high standards of 
personal conduct, practicing honesty in all our professional practices 
and endeavors. 

Additional information : No additional information is available for this paper. 

 

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	1. Introduction
	2. Methodology
	2.1. The Corpora
	2.2 Instrument and Data Processing
	2.3 Word Family as a Counting Unit for lexical coverage
	2.4 The New Vocabulary Levels Test and Interview

	3. Findings and Discussion
	3.1 Vocabulary Levels of English-subtitled Korean, Japanese, Chinese Dramas as opposed to American Dramas
	3.2 Learners’ perception towards viewing English-subtitled dramas

	4. Conclusion and Implications
	Acknowledgment
	Declarations

	REFERENCES

