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Listening comprehension is an area where many foreign language learners feel they experience the most difficulty (Graham, 2003), and vocabulary acquisition can be arduous for ESL learners (Webb & Nation, 2017). Fortunately, today’s language learners have ever-increasing access to culturally rich and enjoyable online resources (Teng, 2019) such as videos, while technological affordances have enabled learners to use various tools like captioning to better utilize these materials to facilitate their listening comprehension and vocabulary learning in FL contexts (Teng, 2021). Videos could serve as a “valuable instructional resource” for second language education (Markham, 1993:183) and can be considered a motivating alternative for L2 learners who are less inclined to use L2 written or listening input in out-of-class contexts (Peters, 2018, Zhang, 2021).
Technologies have taken the realization of multimodal input to the next level by offering numerous options (e.g. caption, subtitle, keyword caption, and captions with glosses) that were not available through more traditional resources (Montero Perez, 2020). This helped learners to visualize what they hear so as to enhance audiovisual input, especially when the material is slightly beyond their level of proficiency (Hsieh, 2020). Accordingly, numerous research has delved into the effects of captioning types on L2 performance and development from different perspectives, for example, vocabulary acquisition (Montero Perez, et al. 2013, 2014, 2018; Feng and Webb, 2020), L2 comprehension (Winke et al., 2010; Hsieh, 2020; Pujadas and Muñoz, 2020; Lai, Wang & Ou, 2021), speech segmentation (Charles & Trenkic, 2015), pronunciation (Wisniewska & Mora, 2020), and grammar (Lee and Révész, 2018; Cintrón-Valentín, 2020).
With the technological affordances, bilingual captions (Chinese and English) are widely used in TV, documentaries, videos and films to transmit information to reach a wider population in an EFL context in China Mainland (Li, 2016). The increasing usage of bilingual subtitles in online videos is attributed to the efforts of amateur subtitlers who translate foreign language videos online on a voluntary basis (Hsiao 2014). Despite the easy accessibility and availability of bilingual captions and their potential value to EFL learners, there is a lack of research into their effects on L2 development (see Yang 2013, Li, 2016, Liao, et al. 2020). Also, very little, if any, empirical research has investigated the influence of access to highlighted target words in bilingual captioning on L2 development.
To address this gap in the literature, this research aims to compare the effectiveness of captions to foster L2 development in lexis and listening comprehension among Chinese university learners at low-intermediate proficiency level under five different captioning conditions: full caption (EC), full caption with highlighted target words and L1 gloss (ECL1), bilingual captions (CEC), bilingual captions with highlighted target words (CECGW), and a control group (NC).