Film as an Immersive Environment for Language Development: A Case Study of College English Learners

The purpose of this study was to examine how an everyday immersion environment influences language development and attitudes toward English among lower intermediate L2 university students. Participants were eight non-English major undergraduates in their second and third years with lower intermediate English proficiency. As an accessible immersion experience, participants engaged in a narrative centered case study using the TV drama Anne with an E (Walley-Beckett, 2017-2019) over a two-month period. After the intervention, three Korean-medium assessments, a story comprehension test, a contextual and situational interpretation test, and an emotional and immersive engagement test, along with one English test, were administered. Results from the story comprehension test confirmed that participants successfully entered and maintained engagement with the story world without losing the narrative thread. Findings from the contextual and situational interpretation test showed that students interpreted events not merely as isolated information but within situational contexts, indicating an emerging awareness of the rules and pressures governing the narrative world. The emotional and immersive engagement test revealed that participants moved beyond surface level comprehension and began responding affectively from within the narrative. Finally, strong performance on the English test suggested English functioned as the natural language of the story for participants overall.