Effectiveness of Using English Captioned Videos on Listening Comprehension Proficiency

The purpose of this study is to examine the effectiveness of using English captioned videos on listening comprehension of EFL university students. Recently English captioned videos have been available and used in EFL classrooms in Japan, but only a few studies have so far been made at clarifying their long-term effects. This paper points out the advantages of using English captioned videos and summarizes previous studies conducted on the effects of using them. Next, a data-based and long-term study is reported. There are two main aims: (1) to measure whether videos with English captions are effective teaching materials in comparison with videos without captions; (2) to measure whether fully captioned videos are more effective than partially captioned ones. Moreover, to get supportive evidence to this empirical study, we analyze the students\u27 evaluation sheets and get feedback on the interest, usefulness and difficulty of the videos used. The results suggest that fully captioned videos are much more effective than partially captioned or non-captioned videos if they are used over the long term such as at least one semester