The purpose of this study is to compare the effects of English captioned video, Japanese subtitled video, and uncaptioned video on listening comprehension. There are strong indications that the use of Japanese subtitles, or closed captions, or a combination of both may improve intermediates students' overall comprehension and retention of the material. The various tests and control groups were chosen on the basis of a pretest, in this case listening comprehension test(CELT). Over the course of several weeks' teaching, a cross-sectional study was conducted comparing the performance of the four groups: Japanese subtitles + English sound and captions with pictures(JCSP), Japanese subtitles with sound and picturesijSP), English sound and captions with pictures (CSP), and English sound with pictures(SP). Under these four different media presentations, Japanese college students (N=125) were tested on listening comprehension after watching the 5 minute segment of the same film twice. The results showed that students exposed to JCSP gained better scores than those exposed to JSP, CSP, SP in their listening comprehension tests and showed significant effects on language learning. These findings suggested that those subjects exposed to JCSP, JSP, and CSP were perhaps reading captions or Japanese subtitles with concurrently guessing the content from the pictures, and that JCSP, JSP and CSP have positive effects on learners' comprehensive input and retention of the learning materials. The results of comparisons among four groups imply that each group seems to have different strategies for processing multimedia.
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