The Effects of using English Captions on Iranian EFL Students’ Listening Comprehension

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of the presence or absence of English captions with an English-language sound track on the university-level Iranian EFL students’ listening comprehension of video passage material. A total of 60 homogenized students of English literature at the second-year of university participated in the study. The students were randomly assigned to two groups to receive different treatments. Both groups watched a short episode (20 minutes) of an English film and they were required to take a 20-item multiple choice (MC) teacher- made listening-comprehension test while they were watching the film. The difference between these groups was in the presence of the caption of the film; that is, the experimental group watched the film with English captions and the control group watched the film without captions. The results of the post-test MC exam revealed that using captions had a significant effect on students’ listening comprehension and those who received the English captions outperformed the other group. Based on the obtained results, it was concluded that providing captions for Iranian university-level EFL students could be helpful in overcoming some of their listening comprehension difficulties.