| The effects of closed captioning upon two film genres were investigated. The literature review and framework for multimedia pedagogy, contains a comprehensive discussion and analysis of the role of captioning within multimedia systems. The studies tested the hypothesis that the presence of captioning has significant effects upon second language learners' acquisition of language items. The effects were analyzed in two-dimensions: the acquisition of new language items and the deepening of knowledge of ones already partially assimilated. The participants were two hundred and sixty Japanese learners with low to intermediate English language proficiency attending a university in Japan. They watched introductory sequences from the films Airplane and The Graduate. Airplane was found to have a slightly more difficult vocabulary content than The Graduate, while at the same time having higher visual input (32 vs. 7 scenes, respectively). Study 1 was a pilot study for comprehension tests and used Multidimensional Scaling to assess participants' perceived patterns of important and interesting information in each film sequence. Differing patterns were found between the two sequences. Study 2 developed Depth of Knowledge Tests, which examined participant knowledge of the same vocabulary items (Airplane, 30; The Graduate, 35) at four different levels: Story Partial-Cloze, Synonym, Non-Synonym, and Definitions Tests. For both films, no significant difference was found between the Definitions Tests and the Non-Synonym Tests. Study 3 tested the captioned vs. normal viewing hypothesis in two stages. For Stage 1, a one-way ANOVA analysis of the Multiple-Choice Comprehension Tests showed that the captioning effect was significant for captioning for The Graduate, but not for Airplane. Stage 2 found a significant effect for the Airplane MANOVA and for The Graduate MANCOVA. With p = .0125, results indicated there might have been significant effects for captioning in the Airplane Story Partial-Cloze Test and in The Graduate Synonym and Non-Synonym Tests. These results suggest that in the incidental viewing context, captioning has a significant effect upon both comprehension and vocabulary acquisition. |
