Effectivenss of using subtitled videos in learning English: A study on Iranian learners

This experimental design study examined the effects of viewing captioned instructional videos on EFL learners’ content comprehension, vocabulary acquisition and language proficiency. It also examined the participants’ perception of viewing the captioned instructional video. All 92 EFL students undertaking the Tape and Video Interpretation course in two classes participated in this study. The randomly assigned experimental class viewed 30 episodes of captioned Connect with English and the control class viewed the same video without captions. Adopting the quantitative approach, a Michigan English Test, Content-Specific Tests and a questionnaire were administered to examine the participants’ content comprehension, vocabulary acquisition and language proficiency development as well as the experimental group’s perception towards viewing the captioned instructional video. Although, both groups recorded gains, the findings were in favor of the use of captioned instructional videos