Abstract:

The common practice in captioning video programs for foreign language instruction is to transcribe the spoken language verbatim into captions. This practice presents a dense visual channel for foreign language learners. The study presented here tested a keyword captioning method based on the hypothesis that keyword captions present learners with less to read without attenuating their comprehension of the information in the spoken message. The design of the experiment was simple; the use of three different amounts of text on video were compared: full text, keywords, and no text. The results of the experiment showed that the keyword captions group outperformed the no-text group and that the full text captions group outperformed the keyword captions group; however, a post-hoc analysis revealed no significant difference between the means of the full text captions group and the keyword captions group. The positive effect of both keyword and full text captions on comprehension, the basic research hypothesis, is confirmed.

Author: Helen Gant Guillory