The role of watching English subtitled programs in the development of second language pragmatic competence

The present study examined whether using English subtitled program which consists of idioms and phrases, have an impact on enhancing English pragmatic competence for the fourth-year college students as foreign language learners and the effect of using videos in the language classroom on raising the students' awareness towards the cultural differences between the main and the target cultures. Furthermore, the study scrutinizes the impact of improving pragmatic competence through watching English program with subtitles on the participants' retention. The participants of this study consist of twenty fourth-year college students of schools of language at Sulaimaniyah University in Iraq. They watched twenty English programs that consisted of idioms with TL subtitles; each program is one minute.Two various tests were utilized to gather the data of the study as a pre-test and a post-test which are a sit-down exam that designed by the researcher herself and a Multiple-Choice Discourse Completion Tests (hereafter MDCT) which used twice; first as post-test and later as a retention test. In order to analyze the obtained data of the study two t-tests and one one-way ANOVA were run. The results showed that watching English subtitled videos helped the EFL learners to become more competent pragmatically, raised the awareness of the students towards the cultural differences between the main and the target cultures and improving pragmatic competence through watching English program with subtitles resulted in longer retention. Keywords: Audio-visual material, Subtitles, Pragmatic Competence, cultural awareness, idioms.