Discussions

This study explores whether subtitles in the learners’ native language (L1) or captions in the target language (L2) best promote EFL learners’ listening

comprehension. All the video clips were authentic materials excerpted from online websites, YouTube and TED. The research participants were students from 3 intact 9^th -grade classes at a public junior high school in Taiwan, in which all the classes were of normal distribution. This fact allowed the researcher to assume that the baseline of the participants’ English proficiency was very similar. The participants of the 3 groups (subtitled, captioned, non-captioned) were implicitly divided into high-proficiency and low-proficiency groups so that the efficacy of each caption mode on promoting listening comprehension of the EFL learners of varied linguistic proficiency could be examined. Data collected from the interventions, which amounted to 9 times in total

4.2.1 Caption modes and listening comprehension

The test results of this study revealed that the students who watched videos with English captions showed a significantly better performance on the subsequent

listening comprehension tests than their counterparts who watched the same videos with Chinese subtitles. The fact that the captioned group outperformed the subtitled group throughout all 9 tests provides evidence that the use of captions is more effective in facilitating the learners’ listening comprehension than using subtitles.

It was also noticed that the learning curve of the captioned group went slightly up, while that of the subtitled group appeared rather flat. In other words, improvement on the listening comprehension was observed in the captioned group, whereas little improvement was shown in the subtitled group throughout the interventions. And the performance of the captioned groups appeared more stable over the 9 tests. This finding indicated that the learners of the captioned groups may have developed their learning strategy and relied on the textual aid of captions to complete the listening comprehension tests. By contrast, the performance of the subtitled and the non-captioned groups appeared unstable. It can be speculated that some semantic or syntactic information was missing to the learners who watched the video materials with the aid of subtitles and the one who watched without any textual aid.

Consequently, more inferences were drawn by these learners, which negatively affected the stability of the performance on the listening comprehension tests of these learners.

Moreover, the non-captioned group, who performed almost as well as the captioned group on test 1 and even outperformed it on test 2, showed much poorer performance at the end than in the beginning of the experiment. This downward

captioned group gradually lost interest in watching the videos and motivation in making efforts to comprehend the materials.

On the whole, the abovementioned data reveals that captions have a strong and positive effect on promoting listening comprehension of the target language. In contrast, subtitles are less helpful in reinforcing their L2 listening comprehension.

Moreover, without the aid of captions to assist the learners while they watch videos, the performance of the learners on listening comprehension tends to drop, suggesting that the learners may have lost interest, confidence, motivation, or had eventually given up on making any effort to comprehend the video materials.

In conclusion, the findings of this present study suggested that captions have more positive effect on the promotion of listening comprehension of EFL learners at the beginning level than subtitles do. The conclusion contradicts the findings of Danan’s study in 2004, which claims that captions are detrimental while subtitles are beneficial to the listening comprehension and language acquisition of beginning learners. However, the conclusion of the study corroborates the findings of Baltove (1999) and Mitterer et al. (2009), which indicated that foreign language captions provide cues for EFL learners to recognize the spoken sounds and lexical information while watching videos with native language subtitles hamper their comprehension.

The conclusion of this study is also in line with the findings from earlier studies (Chen et al., 2018; Lwo, 2012; Taylor, 2005), which presented evidence of better English listening comprehension of learners when they were provided with captions, as opposed to subtitles.

4.2.2 Effect of learner’s linguistic proficiency on English listening comprehension The second research question intends to explore the degree to which the learners,

statistical results suggested that there was selective effect of the caption modes on the listening comprehension of the learners of different linguistic profiles. And main effect of the caption modes was on the more proficient learners. An analysis of the figures in Table 8 revealed that there was a marginal significance in caption modes on English listening comprehension in the high proficiency group. That is to say, the influence of caption modes was marginally significant on the performance of these more proficient learners. The statistical insignificance of these findings, however, was mainly caused by the small number of participants in the proficiency groups using the 3 caption modes. The participating groups were not big enough to generate valid statistical figures in the experiments.

As for the low proficiency group, no significant difference in performance was observed on listening comprehension tests among all the learners using the 3 caption modes. Their poor performance was considered to be the result of their insufficient knowledge of words and phrases. Apparently, although several criterion such as lexical coverage and familiar topics were considered when the researcher was

choosing the materials, the materials used were still too challenging to the test-takers within the low proficiency group. Since the baseline of these low proficiency learners was close to CEFR A-1 level, the video materials were not completely

comprehensible to the learners.

Although main effect of the caption modes was on the more proficient learners, the English teachers may provide scaffold to the less proficient learners to help promote their listening comprehension of authentic video materials. Several explicit instructions on the listening strategies, such as advanced organizers, have been validated to be effective in promoting English listening comprehension in EFL learners (Chen et al., 2018; Chung, 1999; Li, 2012). With proper scaffold integrated

linguistic profiles, may advance in their listening comprehension of the video materials.

4.2.3 The perceptions of the learners toward learning English through watching authentic online videos

The interviewees generally appreciated the experience of learning English via watching authentic videos with English soundtracks and found it enjoyable and meaningful. However, more than half of the respondents confessed that they experienced upset when the content of the video materials was not fully

comprehensible. When asked about which caption mode they would adopt at home, most respondents, from both groups, chose Chinese subtitles because they could better understand the content and contexts of the video materials using the textual aid.

Only 10 of the respondents, who were all from the high English proficiency groups, replied that when watching videos in the future, they would select English captions or the simultaneous display (displaying Chinese subtitles and English captions

simultaneously). These more proficient learners believed that captions were more beneficial in helping them catch the linguistic components of English, while the use of subtitles contributed to filling in the gap of their comprehension.