The effect of caption modes on efl students’ video comprehension

Abstract

Based on perception load theory and cognitive theory with respect to multimedia learning, an experiment was conducted to examine whether caption modes or the amount of captions (full captions, keyword captions and no captions) affected EFL students’ distribution of attention resource in their visual channels and accordingly video comprehension. 147 Chinese students of English majors participated in the experiment. Results indicated that there were no significant differences between the three groups regarding the effect of video materials on participants’ overall comprehension, which did not conform to Guillory’s result. There might be three reasons for it. Apart from that, for the comprehension of picture information, there were no significant differences between the group with keyword captions and the group with no captions but both were obviously better than the group with full captions. As for the scores of language information, there were no significant differences between the group with full caption and the group with keyword captions, but both were better than the group with no captions. Two explanations for the result were proposed.