Abstract
This study aims to compare the pedagogical benefits of two domestically-made English news broadcasts In Taiwan, CTS Inside Taiwan and FTV English News Edition. As the two English news programs were different in many ways, the focus of the study was put on the most distinctive difference: the subtitling mode. CTS Inside Taiwan was broadcast with subtitles, a synchronized coordination of L2 dialogue and L1 script, but FTV English News Edition adopted captions, with both dialogue and script in L2.In the review of previous studies, the advantage of captioned videos was widely recognized in terms of L2 learners’ comprehension and vocabulary learning. Since most of the reviewed studies deal with English learners from European languages, the present experiment investigated Chinese/English subtitling presentation. With college students of intermediate and advanced levels as subjects, this study used six video news clips (three from CTS Inside Taiwan and three from FTV English News Edition) to examine the effect of subtitling on learning outcomes. The tests included multiple-choice questions to assess listening comprehension and cloze tests to measure the spelling and meaning of the target vocabulary words. The relationship between subtitling modes and the subject’s language proficiency level was also addressed. Besides, the participants’ attitudes toward the subtitling devices and their evaluation of the two English news broadcasts were collected through questionnaires.The results of the present study were very different from previous research. It was found that the students, particularly the intermediate level students, seemed to benefit much more from subtitles than from captions in listening comprehension. In the spelling test, the learners performed similarly despite the different treatments they undertook. As to the word meaning acquisition, subtitles was statistically evidenced to exert positive influence. The discrepancy between the findings of the present study and the conclusions of early research was proposed to result from the difference in experimental design and the occurrence of a confounding effect caused by the potential involvement of variables other than subtitling. In the evaluation questionnaires, the subjects expressed that they liked to have a subtitling device when watching English news. The subjects reported that either subtitling model helped them understand the videos, but they demonstrated a clear preference for captions in vocabulary acquisition. With regard to the quality, both English news broadcasts were rated as informative, entertaining and native-like. Generally, the advanced students tended to prefer watching FTV English News Edition.