The influence of English language and Spanish language captions on foreign language listening/reading comprehension (2003)

Paul Markham, Website

Lizette Peter, Website

Markham, P., Peter, L. (2003). The influence of English language and Spanish language captions on foreign language listening/reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Technology Systems, 31(3), 331-341.

ABSTRACT (De paga así que no hay más que el abstract Ver Aquí)

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of using Spanish captions, English captions, or no captions with a Spanish language soundtrack on intermediate university-level Spanish as a Foreign Language students' listening/reading comprehension.

El propósito de este estudio fueinvestigar los efectos del uso de una pista de audio en español con captions en español, captions en inglés o sin captions, en la comprensión auditiva/lectora de estudiantes universitarios de nivel intermedio de español como lengua extranjera.

A total of 213 intermediate (fourth semester) students participated as intact groups in the study. The passage material consisted of a DVD episode (seven minutes) presenting information concerning preparation for the Apollo 13 NASA space exploration mission.

The students viewed only one of three passage treatment conditions: Spanish captions, English captions, or no captions. The Spanish language dependent measure consisted of a 20-item multiple-choice listening comprehension test.

The statistically significant results revealed that the English captions group performed at a considerably higher level than the Spanish captions group which in turn performed at a substantially higher level than the no captions group on the listening test.

The article concludes with a discussion of the pedagogical implications of using multilingual captions in a variety of ways to enhance second language listening and reading comprehension.