Captioned Media in Foreign Language Learning and Teaching by Robert Vanderplank

Author:Robert Vanderplank
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

5.3 Captioned Viewing and Speech Segmentation

Charles and Trenkic (2015) report an all-too-rare study on how learners may improve their segmentation skills in English through watching captioned programmes. They report that English language learners often find it difficult to identify which words are present in the continuous stream of speech, even when the words are familiar, and they hypothesised that simultaneous presentation of aural and written form of a word, as takes place in the bimodal input of captioned programmes, could boost learners’ ability to segment English speech (cf. Mitterer and McQueen’s (2009) conclusions discussed on pages 95–100 of this book). The authors rightly highlight some of the methodological issues in much of the research regarding the benefits of captions, in particular, that often the tests used to check comprehension are tests of reading comprehensions or memory tests. While the results may show that general comprehension is improved by the presence of captions, it is far from clear whether the presence of captions leads to better listening comprehension.

Their study involved twelve Chinese female graduate students at a UK university with a mean IELTS score of 7 (so about lower C1 level in CEFR terms) They were randomly assigned to three treatment groups, bimodal, no subtitles and no sound. They completed a shadowing test as a pre-test (consisting of hundred short excerpts from five documentaries) and then watched 30 minutes of two of these documentaries (a travel/cookery programme by a celebrity chef and a popular science programme presented by a celebrity science professor) in their assigned conditions. The treatment for each documentary was spread over two weeks to explore the cumulative effects on listening of watching captioned programmes. In each week, an immediate post-test (120 excerpts) was carried out. Post-test materials also consisted of multiple excerpts drawn from the five documentaries and three new ones. Immediate post-tests mixed some pre-test excerpts and new excerpts to check on whether learning was becoming generalised to new utterances produced by the same speaker (or the “tuning in” phenomenon, as I have called it). The authors also carried out a delayed post-test consisting of 160 excerpts, again mixing old and new items, and this time final, unrelated items from the fifth documentary (How We Built Britain).

The number of correctly repeated scores for each excerpt for each participant was counted and calculated as a proportion of the total. Averages for each test and for old, new and unrelated items were also calculated. One participant had scored 8.5 on IELTS, and her scores were much higher than those of the others (lending support to the notion I have proposed elsewhere (Vanderplank, 1988b) that accurate shadowing is a skill, which all adult native speakers of a language may be assumed to have).

The overall mean scores of the participants on the four tests indicated that while the bimodal group scored lower than the other two groups on the pre-test, it consistently and significantly outperformed the controls on all the post-tests, showing that bimodal presentation of input can help the foreign language segmentation of continuous speech.

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