The Influence of English Language and Spanish Language Captions on Foreign Language Listening/Reading Comprehension

The purpose of this study was to investigate 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' listening/reading comprehension. A total of 213 intermediate (fourth semester) students participated as intact groups in the study. The passage material consisted of a DVD episode (seven minutes) presenting information concerning preparation for the Apollo 13 NASA space exploration mission. The students viewed only one of three passage treatment conditions: Spanish captions, English captions, or no captions. The Spanish language dependent measure consisted of a 20-item multiple-choice listening comprehension test. The statistically significant results revealed that the English captions group performed at a considerably higher level than the Spanish captions group which in turn performed at a substantially higher level than the no captions group on the listening test. The article concludes with a discussion of the pedagogical implications of using multilingual captions in a variety of ways to enhance second language listening and reading comprehension.