The effects of native language vs. target language captions on foreign language students' DVD video comprehension

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of using Spanish captions, English captions, or no captions with a Spanish-language soundtrack on intermediate university-level Spanish as a Foreign Language students' comprehension of DVD passage material. A total of 169 intermediate (fourth-semester) students partipated as intact groups in the study. The passage material consisted of a 7-minute DVD episode about preparation for the Apollo 13 space-exploration mission. The students viewed only one of three passage treatment conditions: Spanish captions, English captions, or no captions. The English-language-dependent measures consisted of a written summary generated by the students and a 10-item multiple-choice test. The statistically significant results revealed that the English captions group performed at a substantially higher level than the Spanish captions group, which in turn performed at a considerably higher level than the no captions group on both dependent measures. The pedagogical value of using multilingual soundtracks and multilingual captions in various ways to enhance second language reading and listening comprehension is discussed.