Effects of captions and subtitles on the listening process: Insights from EFL learners' listening strategies

Abstract

Captions and subtitles as a form of scaffolding for audiovisual materials has gained much attention in second or foreign language (L2) learning in recent years and various studies report their positive effects on learners' listening comprehension. However, few attempts have been made to investigate how textual information specifically affects the listening process. The present study aims to examine the relationship between on-screen text and the listening process with special reference to 11 distinct listening strategies. A total of 114 first-year Japanese-speaking EFL learners were divided into three groups: no-text group, English caption group, and Japanese subtitle group. Each group was instructed to watch a university lecture video in English under its assigned condition and to answer a questionnaire about the listening strategies employed during the listening activity. The major findings obtained from the present study include (1) the degree of use of imagery and summarization strategies was significantly higher in the subtitle group, and (2) most of the listening strategies relevant to each listening process showed more inter-correlation in the no-text and the caption groups than in the subtitle group throughout the listening process. Pedagogical implications concerning when to use captions and subtitles for L2 listening instruction are discussed.