The Effect Of The Captions’ Different Presentation Styles On EFL Learners’ Listening Comprehension

With the application and popularity of multimedia technology，English videoprograms which are regarded as multimodal language materials show vigorousdevelopment in foreign language teaching in recent years. However, it is stillcontroversial in the influences of the audio-visual learning teaching by using films orprograms. Although it is generally concerned that English video materials can stimulatestudents’ interest in learning, and can help students overcome the cultural differences andbetter understand the meanings with its real and vivid context, teachers are inclined tochoose captioned video materials as the Chinese students’ listening and reading abilityare unbalanced. So, people pay more and more attention to the effectiveness of captionedvideos on content comprehension. Many educators have carried out a series of valuableresearch on captions for foreign language teaching, such as the effects on incidentalvocabulary acquisition and the presentation time of captions, the using L1or L2captionsetc.The design of this research is based on the multimodal cognitive mechanism whichaims to check how the L2caption presentation styles influence Chinese EFL learners’listening comprehension in this dissertation. Based on the related theory, this researchmainly discusses the aspects of static caption, dynamic captions, or presentation rate, andthe location of captions, and puts forward three research questions.The research questions are:1) Is the caption conducive for listening comprehensionwhen the texts appearing before voice?2) Does the caption help the listeningcomprehension when the animated captions which appear simultaneously with voices?3)Does the caption have some effects on listening comprehension when it violates thereading habits?The author chooses non-English major sophomores as the subjects of this research.The language proficiency test was done before the subjects are decided and finally select100of subjects, and then divide them into four groups. First of all, each group watches thethree more visual materials in order to test another two study questions. Then, two groupsof them participate in the experiment of testing the effects of caption locations. Theauthor just plays the video materials once and then the subjects should answer five to sixmultiple-choice questions at once after the subjects watching each material. Afterfinishing answering all the questions, the subjects are also asked to fill in a post-test questionnaire. What’s more, the experiment is carried out in the multimedia language labso as to guarantee the validity and reliability.The author applies the SPSS to analysis the experimental data at last. Based on theresults, the author found the following findings:1) The caption is conducive for listeningcomprehension when the texts appearing before voice. The karaoke-styled captions groupperforms the best in the three groups and then is the static verbatim group and the last isverbatim caption group which prove this hypothesis to some extent. According to thepost-test questionnaire, the author finds that the subjects have a good reaction to karaokecaptions as the texts appear first and then the corresponding words are highlighted withthe voice at the same time, so the subjects can find the needed words easily to decrease theburden of reading captions.2) The caption helps the listening comprehension when theanimated captions which appear simultaneously with voices and it is inferred by thesignificant difference between static caption group and animated caption group. Thesubjects reveal that they like animated captions because they attract their attention easilyin the questionnaire, but they may also put too much attention on the captions instead ofthe pictures in the video material.3) The caption doesn’t have some effects on listeningcomprehension when it violates the reading habits. The two groups do not have greatdifferences. The mean score of bottom caption group is slightly higher than that of topcaption group which may be caused by the reading habits. However, although thesubjects’ reading habits do have some effects, they can adapt to the video material soonaccording to the post-test questionnaire. In consideration of the experimental results, textsof highlighted captions have the influences of information expectation; the appropriateanimated caption design could bring out positive information processing; while thecaptions’ location doesn’t have the expected negative effect. It should be noticed that onlyunder certain conditions can the above effects occur, such as speed limit of speech, videowatching habits, and goal-oriented characteristics etc. It is valuable for us to study thecaption presentation style and more researches should be carried out on this topic to makelanguage teaching and learning more effective.